What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany 9780231544306

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WHAT REMAINS

WHAT REMAINS E VERY DAY ENCOU NT E R S WI TH TH E S OC I AL I ST PAST I N GER M ANY

JONATHAN BACH

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bach, Jonathan P. G., author. Title: What remains: everyday encounters with the socialist past in Germany / Jonathan Bach. Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009184 | ISBN 9780231182706 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231544306 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Socialism—Germany—History. | Germany— History—Unification, 1990. | Germany—Economic conditions. | Nostalgia—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HX274.B33 2017 | DDC 335.430943—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009184

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow

To Yukiko

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction 1 1 “The Taste Remains” 13 2 Collecting Communism 3 Unbuilding

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4 The Wall After the Wall Epilogue: Exit Ghost Notes

183

Bibliography 223 Index

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137

171

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES Figure 1.1. Intershop 2000 in Berlin 14 Figure 1.2. (N)Ostalgia T-shirt 16 Figure 1.3. Cigarettes from Saxony 26 Figure 1.4. Spee brand detergent box from the GDR 30 Figure 1.5. An East packet 32 Figure 1.6. Ostalgia schnapps 34 Figure 1.7. East products trade fair salesman 40 Figure 1.8. Sternquell beer and youth dreams 42 Figure 2.1. Newsletter from the Society for the Documentation of GDR Everyday Culture 55 Figure 2.2. Entry ticket to Zeitreise Museum 57 Figure 2.3. Flyer for GDR Museum Kampehl 58 Figure 2.4. Televisions on display 60 Figure 2.5. Grocery store with full shelves 61 Figure 2.6. Stack of hi-fi units 69 Figure 2.7. Intimate garments 72 Figure 2.8. Trying on clothes 72 Figure 2.9. Living room diorama with woman mannequin ironing 73 Figure 2.10. Surveillance footage from GDR era 75 Figure 2.11. “Interrogation Room” at the DDR Museum Berlin 78

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Figure 2.12. Confronting viewers with their past 82 Figure 2.13. Grocery store with meager products 88 Figure 3.1. Milk Bar in the Palace of the Republic 94 Figure 3.2. The Palace of the Republic 99 Figure 3.3. The famous glass flower in the palace 101 Figure 3.4. Dancing in the palace 102 Figure 3.5. Castle simulation 112 Figure 3.6. “The castle will be built” 118 Figure 3.7. Palace interior after asbestos removal 122 Figure 3.8. The Mountain (Der Berg) 125 Figure 3.9. “Dying is also an art”: Supernova performance in the palace 126–127 Figure 3.10. Demolition of the Palace of the Republic 131 Figure 3.11. The Anti-Humboldt 133 Figure 3.12. “The GDR Never Existed” 133 Figure 3.13. Lawn where the palace once stood 134 Figure 4.1. Black crosses at Checkpoint Charlie 143 Figure 4.2. Cobblestone wall path 146 Figure 4.3. Berlin Wall History Trail Map 147 Figure 4.4. Steel rods marking the Berlin Wall 152 Figure 4.5. Berlin Wall National Monument 153 Figure 4.6. Chapel of Reconciliation 153 Figure 4.7. Fake soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie 156 Figure 4.8. Tourists posing with Berlin Wall segment 157 Figure 4.9. See the wall here! 159 Figure 4.10. East Side Gallery in 1990 161 Figure 4.11. East Side Gallery in 2009 161 Figure 4.12. Encampment in Potsdamer Platz, 1990 163 Figure 4.13. Luxury apartment building Living Levels rising above the East Side Gallery 165

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MAPS Map 2.1. Location of GDR Everyday Life museums 54 Map 3.1. Location of the Palace of the Republic and castle 107 Map 4.1. Map of Berlin Wall and its main memory sites 138

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his book emerges from an over thirty-year long relationship with Germany. Its focus is after unification, but I was lucky enough, if that’s the right term, to visit the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, in the 1980s while a student at Heidelberg, when Germany’s division seemed immutable. A little later, in 1990 I witnessed the currency union when the East German mark was replaced by the West German D-Mark, the midnight streets around Alexanderplatz punctuated by the pop of small, spontaneous fireworks as shops unburdened themselves of their stocks and replaced them with Western products. In retrospect it was fitting that I witnessed this axial moment in the history of the GDR’s material culture, since in the years ahead I would come to explore how materiality figures in society’s negotiations over multiple, overlapping, and often contradictory pasts. On that night, however, I was staff (from a U.S. research institute) at a somewhat surreal conference in East Berlin, held at the former foreign ministry guesthouse in Treptower Park and hosted by the last GDR foreign minister, Markus Meckel. I returned shortly afterward to study in Berlin, once again witnessing an epochal midnight moment standing with friends on the former death strip next to the Reichstag when fireworks, considerably bigger this time, heralded unification itself. As unification receded further into the past, I found its long echo reverberating through my continued visits and projects over the coming

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decades. Research, drawing from over such a long period, takes multifaceted forms. Some of the last twenty years was spent in formal research, connected to academic institutions and funding, but it is often hard to say precisely where research starts and stops. This is especially true when working ethnographically in one country over many years. As with any long-term fieldwork, my observations, conversations, and perambulations relied heavily on the generosity, friendship, and inclinations of others. The following acknowledgments, therefore, encompass much more than the “informants” of a typical ethnographic study. This book owes its existence to a wide range of essential friends, supporters, mentors, enablers, and assistants and to those who shared with me their experiences, feedback, and perspectives or sometimes simply a kind word of encouragement. Before I turn to individuals, several institutions deserve special thanks for supporting my research. I am grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for a Faculty Research Visit Grant and to the Czech National Science Foundation for financial support from a grantfunded project on “Collective Memory and the Transformation of Urban Space” at Masaryk University in Brno. I benefited significantly from a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for their joint two-year summer institute on “The Unification of Germany: Problems of Transition in Comparative Perspective,” and from a Fulbright German Studies Seminar fellowship. I am very thankful to the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung) in Berlin, which hosted me during my DAAD fellowship, and the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin, which allowed me to be part of its extended family when I returned to pursue research while on leave from the New School, to which I am also grateful. Parts of the manuscript were completed while on leave as a visiting professor at the Watson Institute at Brown University and as a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Mina de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. For institutional support I would also like to thank the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, where I was a visiting scholar at the Center on Organizational Innovation.

Acknowledgments Z xv

For enabling the performance of 1989 [Exit Ghost] in 2014 as part of a symposium at the New School and the City University of New York, I want to thank the German Federal Culture Foundation (Bundeskulturstiftung) and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation New York office, as well as the entire cast and crew. Much of the writing benefited immensely from the give and take of workshops, and I want to acknowledge especially the pathbreaking “Contours of the Everyday” project, also known as the Alltag collective; the Zeitgeist Conference on “What does it mean to be German in the twenty-first Century” at the University of Birmingham; the “Past on Display” at the University of Toronto; and the New School workshop on “Memory, Migration, and Materiality.” As a result of these workshops, material that became chapter 2 appeared in a short article as part of a special issue of German Politics and Society in 2015 (vol. 33, nos. 1–2), and in chapters in Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization, edited by Peter McIssac and Gabriele Müller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground, edited, or more precisely gallantly spearheaded, by Andrew Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017). Chapter 4 appeared in the Memory Studies 2016 special issue (vol. 9, no. 1) on “Memory, Materiality, and Sensuality.” An early version of chapter 1 appeared in abbreviated form in Public Culture in 2002 (vol. 14, no. 2), and selected parts of chapters 1 and 2 appeared as a book chapter in Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014). Special thanks are due to Andrew Bergerson for bringing me into the Alltag project, Veit Hopf for everything and then some, and to David Stark. Thanks also to Cristina Cuevas-Wolf and Dani Kranz, and the whole Alltag collective. My gratitude goes to the many people in Germany, not all of whom can be named here, who were generous with their support and time with me in pursuit of this research and who told me many more stories than I could possibly include, including Kali Alavi, Melanie Alperstadt, Nikolaus Bernau, Nina Brodowski, Olaf Brusdeylins,

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Rudolph Denner, Thomas Flierl, Hans-Peter Freimark, Halina Hackert, Jürgen Hartwig, Gero Heck, Günther Höhne, Anna Kaminsky, Wolfgang Kaschuba, Axel Klausmeier, Rainer Klemke, Coco Kühn, Dieter Lämpe, Adriana Lettrari, Andreas Ludwig, Jürgen Reiche, Hanno Sowade, Sandra Starke, Romy Weyrauch, Stefan Willer, Stefan Wolle, and Martin Zepter, as well as colleagues in Brno, especially Radim Marada and Szalo Csaba. Thanks also to Susanne Beer, Gisela Hirschmann, Loran Jacob, Erik Porath, Martine Saurel, and Florian Stache. Of my dear friends in Germany, who are like family, I am especially grateful to Katharina Bahn, Thomas Bauer, Hans-Arthur Falkenrath, Burkhard Freitag, Hans-Joachim and Petra Giessmann, Sophie Hopf, Veit Hopf, Matthias Karadi, Claudia Schulz, Franzis Stich, Christine Wendland, and the entire Wanderung gang. At the New School, I wish to thank Michael Cohen, Stephen Collier, Alexandra Delano, Julia Foulkes, Bill Hirst, Ashok Gurung, Victoria Hattam, Rachel Heiman, Nora Krug, Carin Kuoni, Elzbieta Matynia, Virag Molnar, Hugh Raffles, Trebor Scholz, Everita Silina, Jürgen von Mahs, Antina von Schnitzler, and extra special thanks to Geeti Das, Claudia Horn, Franziska König-Paratore, and Sheila Shettle. Christian Neuner produced the lovely maps, for which I am very grateful. For various forms of support, feedback, and inspiration over the years in New York and beyond, thanks also to Susanne Baackmann (my co-chair from the German Studies Association Memory Studies Interdisciplinary Network), Katrin Bahr, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Rachel Daniell, Jennifer Evans, Lindsey Freeman, Grete Kegel Fry, Yifat Gutman, Krista Hegburg, Isabella Hertner, Michael Herzfeld, Andreas Huyssen, Marilyn Ivy, Justinian Jampol, Stephan Jaeger, Sara Jones, Stefan Knust, Eric Langenbacher, Doreen Lee, Melanie Lorek, Sharon Macdonald, Peter McIssac, Sofian Merabet, Gabrielle Müller, Michal Murawski, Ben Nienass, Juan Obarrio, Serguei Oushakine, Sonali Pahwa, John Pemberton, Michael Rothberg, Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Albert Scharenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Sharon Simpson, Amy Sodaro, Monique Girard Stark, Jeremy Straughn, Michael Taussig, Roxanne Varzi, Janet Ward, Dana Alina Weber, Karin Wehn,

Acknowledgments Z xvii

Jenny Wüstenberg, and Yasemin Yildiz. A shout-out is always due to Scott Solomon and Jim Josefson. I am continuously grateful for Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Wong, who, from a completely different context, have provided me with insights into the workings of authenticity, appropriation, and memory. A big thank you goes to my editor at Columbia University Press, Eric Schwartz. I’m grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their generous and productive comments. I want to recognize the love and patience of my mother Suzanne, my brother Raymond, and sister Claudia and their families, and my motherin-law Hiroko—for all of them, this was a long time coming. My father, Robert, passed away toward the end of this book’s writing, as did my father-in-law, Tetsuhiko. Both would have been very proud to see it, and I feel their presence keenly. Most of all, my indebtedness is reserved for the person without whom this book would never have seen the light of day and with whom I am blessed to see both daylight and moonlight— my companion in pursuit of the mysterious workings of the past in the present, Yukiko Koga.

WHAT REMAINS

INTRODUCTION

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he GDR never existed.” Nonsense, of course—the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, existed for forty cold war years as the front line of the Soviet Bloc, as West Germany’s socialist double and as a lived reality for sixteen million people. Yet, eighteen years after German unification in 1990, this phrase could be seen sprayed in foot-high letters on the remaining foundation of the recently razed East German Palace of the Republic, smack in the middle of Berlin.1 This wry provocation expresses how unification created a ghostly situation: the GDR became a present absence, invoked mostly to be disavowed.2 When in 1990 the most advanced socialist country dissolved with breakneck speed, the artifacts it left behind appeared as debris, detritus, suddenly out of time and out of place, anachronistic remnants of a failed dream for socialist modernity. This book concerns the aftermath of such radical discontinuity. It looks at what happens when the state vanishes, leaving behind a material legacy that both resists and demands a response from ordinary people. I trace this response through contemporary encounters with things and places from socialist everyday life as they become repackaged as nostalgia items, redeployed as social criticism, and reused in ways that transform the meaning of coming to terms with the past. When the prominent former East German activist Joachim Gauck, soon to become Germany’s president, was asked in an interview whether

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nostalgia for the GDR was a danger for democracy, he replied, “Self-evidently. Nostalgia for the East—Ostalgie—diminishes everything that constitutes our democracy. Through selective memory, trivialization, and denial we risk losing the political judgment that can distinguish dictatorship from democracy.”3 This common refrain extends to the discussion of everyday life under socialism, leaving little space for ambiguity: “The only people who could possibly have regarded everyday life as normal in the closed society” of the GDR, reads a 2014 educational publication on “Everyday Life” from the think tank associated with Germany’s main conservative political party, “were those prepared to acquiesce to scarcity, pollution, surveillance and shoot-to-kill orders, or who repressed or accepted this reality as inevitable.”4 At the same time, public opinion polls twenty years after unification show half of former GDR citizens, about eight million people, see “more good than bad” in their memory of the failed state.5 Ostalgie, a major social phenomenon characterized by the neologism that combines the German words for east and nostalgia, has lasted decades, encompasses commerce, media, and tourism and is a perennial topic of political and cultural discussion. The sentiments that socialist intentions were in principle laudable, or that friendship was more genuine in the East despite the surveillance state, or that specific GDR social welfare programs such as childcare were more progressive than in the West, are not limited to recalcitrant regime loyalists. To appreciate what is at stake in the “profoundly unhelpful . . . polarization of positions” that has emerged around the legacy of the GDR, especially concerning everyday life, it is important to locate contemporary discussions in the context of the double inheritance of the Nazi and socialist past.6 While ideologically opposite, these regimes are often colloquially bundled together as Germany’s dual dictatorships.7 For a nation whose current identity rests in large part on its substantial accomplishments in coming to terms with the past, this contentious comparison haunts and shapes debates over remembering the socialist, and by extension the National Socialist, eras, with implications for a wider European ethics of memory that relies heavily on the German model.8

Introduction Z 3

The everyday is thus far from an innocent subject. This book sees the everyday as neither a site for damnation or redemption. The everyday transcends and transgresses the boundaries of the political through its malleability—the everyday as refuge, as false consciousness, as a space for liberation and collusion, retreat and restlessness. Material culture offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity because it confers on ordinary things an important yet underexplored role in working through the living legacy of contested pasts. In exploring how the past is appropriated in the present, this book shares a core concern with memory studies about how symbolic meaning is produced and attached to places, objects, and people.9 It enriches such approaches by looking at how different modes of engagement with material remains take the forms of commodification, display, and performance—what I refer to as acts of appropriation—explored in this book. These modes of engagement add, displace, and challenge the settling of symbolic meaning. Whereas memory studies is often concerned with how such engagements produce new narrations of the past, I want to show how material culture from the past comes to circulate in overlapping economies of the present: the marketplace for “East” products, the symbolic economy of national symbols, the creative economy of twentyfirst-century Berlin, and the global memory economy. The effect of circulation is not to settle on a new narrative about the past (even if it advances contenders), to make money (even if some money is to be made), or to keep the past “alive” (even if some historical awareness is amplified and transmitted across generations). Rather, it is to keep the present unsettled, to keep narratives from congealing. The material culture I examine in this book sits uncomfortably between different poles of value. Some items from the past, like antiques, have value and circulate but are not unsettling (unless perhaps they are looted). Other items, like certain obsolete products, have no value and cease to circulate (except perhaps as waste). The orphan artifacts from the former GDR examined in this book have an ambiguous value, and their circulation increases that

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ambiguity. Their value, so to speak, lies not in exchange but in their ability to unsettle. These objects unsettle because everyday objects and places—here household products, television sets, buildings, and even the Berlin Wall itself—are (mis)used in ways not anticipated or sanctioned by their makers, original users, or mainstream society.10 As they move between invisibility and visibility, they reveal how vestiges of socialism become vernacular forms of remembrance and chart a different trajectory alongside, and often against, official public memory discourses. This book traces the unsettling effects of these artifacts unmoored from their vanished state and demonstrates how ordinary people use the spaces of the everyday to create memory from below.11 The story of this book begins when East Germany, considered the most economically and technologically advanced country in the Eastern Bloc, disappeared in 1990, less than a year after its fortieth anniversary. With its precipitous collapse, an entire modern state’s materiality seemed abruptly obsolete, from clothes and detergent to factories to the Berlin Wall. Such a thoroughgoing reversal was possible because the East’s end was technically an accession to the West, not integration between two equal states: at midnight on October 3, 1990, federal (West) German law applied literally overnight throughout the East. Many former East Germans (and some former Westerners) decried this approach to unification as disabling the agency of the East to set the terms of its transformation, betraying the spirit of the original revolution against the communist government and coming uncomfortably close to colonization. Whether unification was fated to happen in this way or not, it set the stage for both an unequal power relationship and an unprecedented case of cultural obsolescence, as an entire country’s infrastructure, products, and standards were in short order widely considered inferior, antiquated, undesirable, and quickly replaced by Western goods. Cultural obsolescence and fetishizing of Western goods occurred all throughout the former Soviet Bloc as the market economy swept former

Introduction Z 5

socialist countries in the 1990s. Yet the process was much more far reaching in the former GDR because of its whirlwind accession to West Germany. This makes the GDR transition unique while prefiguring the transformations in material culture and everyday life across the postsocialist world, from Eastern Europe and the Balkans across Russia and Central Asia to, in its own way, postreform China.12 The especially rapid shift in the German case poses an unusual challenge for understanding the modalities of the everyday. Ethnographic work on the everyday usually assumes that the everyday is embedded, grounded, and embodied in fine-grained routines. Yet because unification happened so abruptly, the socialist everyday in today’s Germany appears dislocated, disembodied, and out of context. The everyday appears not as a given sphere of analysis, but itself as an artifact open to reappropriation, recombination, and resignification. For those who lived under socialism, the everyday became a sphere where people confront their life experiences under new circumstances and where encounters with everyday objects from “back then” in the present raise difficult questions about what constitutes complicity in the former system and acquiescence in the current one. This sense of complicity is tied to the status of material culture under state socialism, where the material world—from household products to grocery stores to buildings—was explicitly enlisted by the state to mold and discipline class consciousness. Something as banal as a colorful plastic eggcup from the GDR contains within it the condensed history of East German plastics as an ideological front line in the struggle for socialist values and power.13 This gives rise to the powerful subtext in scholarly and political discourses that the socialist everyday inescapably hides a darker antidemocratic agenda. One person’s souvenir kitsch, or cherished memory, can thus also be condemned as a symbolic trivialization of the past. The German word to trivialize—verharmlosen—means literally to make harmless, and the last thing a responsible, democratic citizen wants is to be accused of declaring Germany’s history of dictatorship harmless. *

*

*

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While everyday life in former East Germany has grown in interest for historians, comparatively little scholarship has examined how the socialist everyday carries over into united Germany as a vector for working through the past.14 Even less attention has been paid to how socialist material culture figures in the process of unification at the everyday level.15 This book shares with historians of the everyday a conviction that change is located not only in grand structures but also in quotidian practices. It emphasizes individual agency and contingency, as does historical work on everyday life under fascism and similar work about the socialist era. However, this is a contemporary, not historical investigation; I am not trying to reconstruct the past through the everyday or to explain the “problem of normalcy” in historical perspective.16 Rather, I am investigating what happens to this everyday sphere after it is abruptly disrupted and turned into a troubled inheritance of the united German present. Drawing from interviews, field research, scholarly and media analysis conducted over more than two decades, What Remains takes the form of an ethnography of encounter, in Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel’s sense in which “meaning, identities, objects, and subjectivities emerge through unequal relationships involving people and things that may at first glance be understood as distinct.”17 Encounter, for Faier and Rofel, is the process through which categories emerge through “engagements across difference.”18 What we consider contemporary German identity results, in part, from the kind of encounters described in this book. These encounters are between people and people, people and things, and things and people. Through these encounters, the artifacts explored in this book become sites of active unsettling that keeps them in circulation in the media, popular consciousness, and market. Beginning from the local, the intimate, and the small, What Remains moves to the national and global, the impersonal and large. It looks at consumer objects of nostalgia, museums of everyday life under socialism, the controversy over the former East German parliament building, and traces of the Berlin Wall. These mostly unassuming sites differ from high profile cases such as secret police files or border guard trials. Unlike studies

Introduction Z 7

of political institutions, intellectuals, or the persistence of stereotypes across the former East-West border, these sites capture the play of presence and absence in the wake of political upheaval that comes from the stubbornness of material remains: present and future generations have little choice about whether to encounter remains from the past—the things are there.19 Yet they are not automatically part of what we loosely call memory; on the contrary, it takes work to imbue objects with memory value. This book argues that such memory work happens through acts of appropriation—the process of making something one’s own—and that appropriation deserves a conceptual status within scholarship on memory to understand how ordinary people engage with disavowed pasts. Appropriation is a key mechanism by which things once thought bygone or deemed unworthy of memory are actively (re)incorporated into the present and given new value. The term appropriation is often used in English to express taking something at another’s expense, a forceful transfer of property that is in some way illegitimate or at least morally questionable. It can also refer less judgmentally to the process by which an object is incorporated into people’s routines and thereby into their sense of self. Indeed, the pragmatist philosopher William James elevated the act of appropriation to the central action by which identity is constructed out of experience. Our present self, “the hook from which the chain of past selves dangles” as James put it, appropriates the past and is appropriated by the future.20 I use the term appropriation because it draws attention to both materiality and the processual nature of otherwise singular events. Unification is what the sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici would call a restless event, rather than an event with a clear beginning and end upon which a teleological transition rests.21 The objects that this book follows, from the trash heap to the store and museum, are restless items, and encounters with them form and reform identity along the chain of past and future. In anthropological studies of cultural appropriation, the meaning of objects that move across cultural borders shift as they become the objects of aesthetic desire—a once sacred statue becomes a private ornament, gifts

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become commodities, use value becomes exchange value. As they cross borders, be they temporal or spatial, their value changes, similar to how commodities “step up” or “step down” in value when they cross national borders.22 The mundane objects explored in the first half of the book—once discarded or derided items that can be eaten or worn—change their value as they circulate anew through commodification in the market economy and museum displays. This enables such objects to function as a form of cultural transmission across generations, becoming generative of new practices rather than passive symbols for political manipulation, redemption, or resistance. Commodification of the past, I argue, does not in itself pose an obstacle to “the positive goals of recollection” but rather allows for amateur, popular, and performative forms of appropriation to produce legitimate forms of knowledge about the past.23 This process appears in a different way in the second half of the book, where we shift from objects consumed (originally) in private to the consumption of urban spaces of former socialist state power. Here the everyday is inverted in the form of monumental socialist public works that once sought to co-opt and coerce everyday life. By following prominent structures as they are actively unmarked—unbuilt, desecrated, demolished— and then re-marked through their subsequent appropriation, we see how they reappear at the site of their disappearance and thus circulate in a contested struggle over the meaning of the past, the nation, and the very nature of authentic representation and experience. Two dialectical disappearances form the central cases—the former East German Palace of the Republic and the reappearance of the Berlin Wall as a memory site after a generation of absence—and embody the active struggle over inheritance not as mourning for a lost past but as efforts to harness and direct the excess symbolic power contained in material objects. Chapter 1 begins with consumer wares from the GDR era known as “East products.” It follows their disappearance and reappearance along with the accompanying trope of nostalgia for communism. The strong

Introduction Z 9

emotions raised by these seemingly quotidian objects, I argue, signify the difficulties of confronting “normal” life under a dictatorship in a country where the Nazi everyday remains controversial. The chapter opens with a visit to the then newly opened store Intershop 2000 in former East Berlin and investigates how consumption became a mechanism for psychological and social processing of the rapid cultural reversals brought about by reunification, closing with a visit to a trade fair for East products in Berlin in 2013, showing how East products evolved from derided ephemera to a regional industry. East products have become the objects of “ostalgia,” or nostalgia for things from the East, claiming new forms of value in unified Germany. Against the standard media dismissal of East products as glib or trivial holdovers, I show how the nostalgia they embody functions in a trickster role, subtly undermining the national project of collective memory through irony, wordplay, and symbolic ambiguity. I argue that commodification is central to nostalgia as a collective phenomenon because marking representative items from a past era as valuable keeps them in circulation and gives them the capacity to transmit cultural knowledge. By dislodging and recombining the symbols, slogans, and styles of the old regime, objects of nostalgia become effectively contemporary. Chapter 2 follows everyday socialist objects away from the store shelf and into the museum, contrasting the previous chapter’s tactics of commodification with emerging strategies of display and representation in the creation of cultural memory. Turning everyday objects into museum artifacts, it argues, draws ordinary people into contact with political and scholarly debates concerning the “correct” way to remember life under the socialist regime. The chapter’s core is an ethnographic exploration of how amateur, privately funded museums of everyday life under socialism arose to challenge and supplement state-supported representations of the East in professional history museums. It shows how a motley group of collectors evolved into an amateur museum landscape and how they use representational strategies to claim the mantle of authenticity. Set against a political context in the GDR where the everyday was thoroughly

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politicized, I critically analyze the museums’ claims to apolitical authenticity as a way of unsettling the historical narrative and the politics of memory. As the museums confront the tension between lived experience and politics, I argue, these controversial amateur spaces play an important role in positioning the everyday as an integral part of the process of working through the recent socialist past for both East and West Germans. Chapter 3 shifts the debates about the everyday to the built environment, looking at how a historically layered site in the center of Berlin becomes the focus of projections about the “proper” handling of inherited remains. It follows the former East German parliament, known as the Palace of the Republic, as it is “unbuilt” and transformed into a complex case of inheritance, both spatially between East and West and temporally across generations. It argues that the palace’s unique function during socialist times as a hybrid political and everyday space made it an especially ambiguous site when, after unification, it was condemned, demolished, and replaced with a copy of its predecessor, the former imperial castle. This appropriation through erasure contrasts with previous chapters’ exploration of appropriation through commodification and representation. The chapter shows how the site became a cause célèbre for former Easterners seeking to save the palace, for conservatives determined to rebuild the imperial castle as a symbol of the new Germany that harks back to its Prussian past, and for a younger generation seeking to subversively reuse the space through performance to transcend both nostalgia and national imagery. In the process, I argue, the palace becomes a focal point for debates about the role of modernity in representing Germany’s national aspirations and self-consciousness as well as an experimental space for performative appropriation by the post-unification generation. Having moved from local objects of nostalgia to the national space of Berlin’s palaces, the final chapter moves to an international symbol for state repression, the cold war, and the overcoming of borders, the Berlin Wall. This chapter shows how the material space of the wall disappeared as a border to reappear nearly a generation later as a site of memory,

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incorporating modes of commodification, display, and performance introduced in the earlier chapters. It argues that the wall was first taken “out of time” (detemporalized) and then retemporalized within narratives of trauma, consumption, and the political through three key sites of commemoration—the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse, Checkpoint Charlie, and the East Side Gallery. Independently, and as part of the city’s official “concept” for memorializing the wall, the chapter shows how these sites connect the city as much to its search for new frontiers of possible futures as they do to its past. It argues that a confluence of conscience, “cool,” and commercialism transformed the wall from a source of shame into a positive symbol of the city’s ability for cultural regeneration. An epilogue offers a coda on the emerging landscape of appropriation explored in the previous chapters. It follows members of the first generation to come of age after unification as they create and perform a play more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The play, 1989 [Exit Ghost] is a complex act of appropriation combining Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the GDR playwright Heiner Müller’s play Hamlet Machine, notes from rehearsals for the first East German production of Hamlet Machine in 1989 as the Berlin Wall was falling, and documentation of contemporary texts and media. In this performance the events of 1989 are used to ultimately form a backdrop for the appearance of recent protests in Greece, Spain, and the Middle East, raising new questions about what it means to do justice to the past and the present through the act of inheritance. The cases explored here cover the first quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, roughly one full generation. Each chapter ends as the relation between vernacular remembrance and collective memory starts to shift toward institutionalization: the market’s embrace of East products, the tentative embracing of everyday life by state-supported museums, the final effacement of the Palace of the Republic to clear the way for the reconstruction of the castle, the incorporation of the East Side Gallery into the Berlin Wall Foundation. In what has been a story of memory from below, these moments seem to mark a new assertiveness in the role of the state. Yet in the epilogue the younger generation, reflecting

12 Y Introduction

on 1989 as they watch the Arab Spring revolutions flourish and fail, shows how the continued invocation of the everyday disturbs, subverts, and redirects efforts to reconcile Germany’s layered historicity. The unification of Germany presented an unusual second chance for Germans to practice the art of coming to terms with the past. In the chapters that follow, What Remains ethnographically captures how ordinary people practice this art through everyday encounters that unsettle both past and present.

1 “THE TASTE REMAINS”

I

n October 1998, a squat building with oddly sloped walls and a big red M over the door appeared on a grassy empty lot in an industrial area near the former border. The oddly modernist, vulnerable building was one of the last surviving “space expansion halls” from the former East Germany, a telescoping portable house of aluminum and beaverboard that could be assembled in one day and carted around on a trailer. Once produced in the thousands and ubiquitous in the socialist landscape, this forlorn specimen now formed a temporal and spatial contrast against the backdrop of massive, nineteenth-century factory buildings. Five years earlier these impressive edifices still housed the East German Narva lightbulb factory. Now they were undergoing transformation from an “age of industrial exteriors,” as the area’s development company put it, to an “age of information interiors.”1 Fitting neither neatly in the age of industry nor information, these incongruous “space expansion halls” had once belonged to Mitropa—a ghostly contraction of “Central Europe” (Mittel Europa) that was the name of the dining car company of the even more anachronistically named German Imperial Railway (Deutsche Reichsbahn), socialist East Germany’s truncated rail system. After unification in 1990, the Western German Federal Railways took over the East German system. The cost of scrapping these now useless buildings ran into the thousands of dollars; Elke Matz, a West Berlin graphic designer and collector of Mitropa artifacts, bought two of them for the symbolic price of one German

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FIGURE 1.1  Intershop 2000 in Berlin. Intershop 2000 (right) next to another former

Mitropa “space expansion hall.” The shop is located on the site of the former GDR Narva light bulb factory in an industrial section of the popular Friedrichshain district in Berlin. 2012. Photo by author.

mark and opened them as an exhibit-cum-store called Intershop 2000 (see figure 1.1). The original Intershop was a chain of state retail establishments set up by the GDR for hard currency sales. It was a type of duty-free store for Western time travelers on their visits to the world of the East and a honey pot to suck up precious hard currency that found its way into Easterners’ pockets as gifts from Western relatives. In socialist days these stores stocked scarce consumer and luxury items such as chocolate, electronics, and perfume. The shops were a constant reminder of not only the material failings of the GDR economy but also the incongruity of the socialist ideal with the state’s own hard currency-seeking activities. Intershop 2000, whose then futuristic name (in 1998) announced the tenth anniversary of reunification, showcased old GDR products that were, in most cases, now almost equally as scarce as the Western goods once were.2 It was intended initially as an exhibit to capture the material

“The Taste Remains” Z 15

culture of a rapidly vanishing era through commercial products and quotidian accoutrements, but visitors consistently attempted to purchase the items on display. To accommodate a demand for items that, at the time, could only be found in flea markets or wholesale warehouses, the curatorsturned-owners split Intershop 2000 into a historical exhibit and a version of its original role as a retail shop. From senior citizens seeking familiar products to hip Western collectors of kitsch, visitors came to peruse the shelves for GDR brands and memorabilia. The inverted Intershop caused a media flurry, catching a wave of nostalgia for socialism known in Germany as ostalgia (the neologism made by removing the n from nostalgia, leaving ost, which means “east”).3 Intershop 2000 was part of a burgeoning phenomenon in the late 1990s, before the film Good-bye Lenin pushed the trend from counterculture to mainstream.4 Back in 1998, nostalgia parties blossomed sporting “visas” for entry tickets and nostalgia bars sprung up, such as Wallflower, featuring a papier-mâché Berlin Wall, VEB Ostzone (People’s Factory Eastern Zone) with its undrinkable cocktail “the General Secretary,” or The Conference, which greeted its guests with figures of former party chiefs Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker. If, shortly after unification, East Germans famously abhorred anything made in the East (even milk and eggs) in favor of items from the West, nearly ten years later the situation underwent a certain reversal: Ostprodukte (East products)—everyday items from the GDR that were still or once again available, especially foodstuffs and household goods—staged a comeback in specialty shops with names like East Oasis, ordinary grocery stores, and the emerging online marketplace of the Internet. Such nostalgic themes struck a nerve in the media and among politicians who mostly castigated the phenomenon as a misguided or naive trivialization of the failed socialist regime and its violent apparatus of repression. Ironic appropriations that openly mocked the failed regime stood a chance of social acceptability, but any expression that could be interpreted as longing for the GDR was quickly derided as delusionary and ungrateful (figure 1.2). In spite and because of this opprobrium,

FIGURE 1.2  (N)Ostalgia T-shirt. The text reads, in part, “Not everything was good,

but a lot was better! There was more time for love, children were taken care of, we still had neighbors and colleagues, work and training for everyone.” Radebeul, 2009. Photo by author.

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ostalgia quickly became a standard term in public discourse, embracing a spectrum of colloquial usage both pejorative and playful. When referring to the habits of Easterners, ostalgia tends to confirm a widespread Western image of East Germans as deluded ingrates longing pathetically for the socialist past. Yet when the subject is the knowingly ironic Westerner (or the “sophisticated” Easterner) enjoying the retro aura of GDR-era design, ostalgia appears as a (p)ostmodern artifact valued precisely for its lack of emotional attachment to a specific past. Ostalgia is thus simultaneously two forms of nostalgia, forms that are similar to the distinctions Marilyn Ivy discerns in relation to nostalgia in Japan: a “modernist” nostalgia in the former East Germany and a “nostalgia of style” primarily (but not exclusively) in the West.5 This chapter examines the production and consumption of East products as a key symbolic location for the crystallization of these two types of nostalgia. It shows how these forms of nostalgia play into the shifting role of East products from contemptuous ephemera to a regional industry and accepted part of united Germany’s cultural and memory landscape. The chapter begins by examining the role of modernist nostalgia that coalesces in the former GDR in the decade after reunification, where the consumption of East products appears as a form of production itself—a reappropriation of symbols that establishes “ownership” of symbolic capital or what Michel de Certeau calls a “manipulation by users who are not its makers.”6 Nostalgia in its modernist vein functions as a mechanism for psychological and social processing of the rapid cultural reversals brought about by reunification. The chapter then turns to the nostalgia of style, in which East products constitute floating signifiers of the “neokitsch” that undermine consumption as an oppositional practice by at once turning the consumer into the market and the goods into markers of personal ironic expression. As the phenomenon of ostalgia becomes increasingly institutionalized and commodified within Germany’s larger cultural memory landscape, it is the Janus face of nostalgia that allows it to function as a means for transmitting cultural knowledge. I argue here that nostalgia is a collective

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phenomenon that emerges through the effects of commodification, which transforms everyday objects into nostalgia objects and enables their circulation and recombination with contemporary debates, tropes, and symbols. Examining the relation between materiality and nostalgia helps understand not only how ostalgia emerged but why it did not wane with the coming of the first postunification generation, rather becoming seemingly entrenched. The German case also helps us think through broader questions about the function of nostalgia as a form of cultural transmission.

MODERN LONGINGS AND THE LONGING FOR THE MODERN Nostalgia is colloquially a form of longing for the past, but its modernist variant is less a longing for an unredeemable past as such than a longing for the fantasies and desires that were once possible in that past. In this way, what can be called a modernist nostalgia is a longing for a mode of longing that is no longer possible. This form of nostalgia became particularly acute in the case of the ex-GDR, where socialism generated a particular mode of longing that was exceptionally integral to its identity, only to be inverted and voided with exceptional speed after the state collapsed and was absorbed by its alter ego. The socialist state had projected a harmonious future in which the people’s hard work would produce a utopian state of material satisfaction once capitalism withered away. At the same time, East Germans had wide access to Western images, especially through television, that showed in their own fantastical way the appearance of living in accord with material surroundings. These two projections—the socialist utopia of countless slogans, speeches, and posters, and the consumer utopia of West German television advertisements and media spectacles, fused into a desire split temporally (into the future) and spatially (onto the West). Milena Veenis notes how when East Germans saw “the beautiful material” of the West, “with its harmonious

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aesthetic compositions and its tangible, soft and sensuous characteristics, [it] somehow seemed to be the concrete realization and the ultimate fulfillment of all the beautiful-sounding but never-realized (socialist) promises about the Golden Future, in which we would all have a fully developed Self, while living in complete harmony with each other.”7 Longing in the GDR was thus premised on an unattainable object of desire, the “fully developed Self “ promised by both socialism and Western materialism. The longing for a socialist utopia was therefore perversely connected to a fetishism of Western material culture. The sudden possibility of unification in 1989 and 1990 held the incredible promise of instantiating these temporal and spatial fantasies. The inability of unification to fulfill the dialectical fantasies by sublimating the seemingly opposed socialist-trained and capitalist-propelled desires for harmony produced a modernist form of nostalgia in the former East. This nostalgia has as its object not the GDR itself, but the longing associated with the GDR. What had been a frozen aspiration for an indefinitely deferred future shifted to nostalgia for that aspiration. Nostalgia for the loss of longing was part of a more general sense of loss experienced by the citizens of the former GDR, a loss that Gisela Brinker-Gabler describes as a dis/re/location from Germany to Germany, “a rupture of the collective East German subject and the individual subject—which is also a rupture of language—and a replacement in a reunited Germany with new conditions of experience.”8 The GDR had been a leader among Eastern Bloc nations in technology and industry. Even during the revolutions of 1989 and 1990 the GDR seemed to be the winner, literally “becoming Western” overnight while its socialist neighbors could only dream of such transmogrification at the end of a long path. But once incorporated into the West, citizens of the former GDR were faced with a clear subordinate status. The high rate of unemployment, lower wages, and social anomie that pervaded the East soon after unification were at first viewed as transitional effects but quickly became stubborn markers of eastern Germany’s relative position. By the mid1990s the rap group A.N.T.I. sang, “Eastniggers . . . /are what we all are. /

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The color of our skin is white / yet in Germany we are the last shit.”9 A representative article around the same time in a respected western German journal put it somewhat differently: East Germans, the scholars wrote, “have learned to live with the fact that they are second-class citizens, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.”10 With such open admissions of the failed promise of unification to bring the East up to the level of the West, it is hardly surprising that eastern Germans would not be content with the “fact” of their second-class station. Articulating an East German identity, however, is a precarious task, since the East firmly occupies the discursive space of inferiority and, practically speaking, western Germans quickly dominated the economic, cultural, and political landscape of the East. It is here that East Products helped take the psychological edge off of the western advantage in unification. Daphne Berdahl notes that while the eastern German seeks “oneness” with the western German, the westerner has no need of such unity and is, in fact, empowered to deny it.11 East Products work precisely to reverse this: by refusing the self-evidently superior western goods for the “good old” East German products, it is the easterner who seeks to use the market symbolically against the West. At first the inversion of the value of East Products was a direct reaction to the shame that surrounded GDR products as inferior in quality, a sentiment widely shared in the West and internalized in the East. In this way East Products served as a form of cultural intimacy in Michael Herzfeld’s sense, where a set of objects define insiderhood through their disapproval by powerful outsiders, in this case West Germans.12 The products of everyday life that returned to or remained on the market—detergent, pickles, mustard, beer—were intimate also in the literal sense of being ephemeral products that came into close contact with the body. In the early years after reunification some people stockpiled goods out of practicality, like a man who recalled hoarding a year’s supply of Spee-brand detergent when he realized that stores suddenly considered it worthless. After the initial clearing of the shelves of all things Eastern, a few stores began to hang signs saying “We Sell Eastern Products,” offering certain popular GDR

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brands to appeal to consumers both exhausted by the task of trying new items and seeking to save money. Within a short time certain brands developed cult status, in part because they were still available, familiar, and inexpensive and in part because of their design, which emphasized the instantly legible retro-directness of socialist-era advertising. In conversations with friends, in stores, and in online forums, I encountered eastern Germans regarding Eastern products as better tasting in part because they were more authentic: some considered them purer in substance (less preservatives) and soul (less marketing gimmicks), even if this was not always the case. “Good old” East German products became vehicles of unsubtle defiance, reflected in their bitingly tongue-in-cheek advertising slogans: “The East has Chosen” announced Kathi baked goods, while Club Cola declared that, though it was “Belittled by some, it can’t be killed—Club Cola, the Cola from Berlin,” adding, for good measure, “Hurrah, I’m still alive.” Rondo coffee’s slogan was even more direct: “Of course not everything we made before was bad,” and a regional tabloid newspaper, Super Illu, touted that it was “One of us,” presumably best read while drinking Club Cola, which also used the tag “our Cola.” The advertisements from old East German cigarette brands were the boldest and most visible on billboards and across the cities: “I smoke Juwel, because I already tested the West. One for us.” Karo cigarettes aggressively claimed an “Attack on the uniformity of taste,” while the f6 brand declared boldly: “The taste remains.”13 This discursive terrain is immediately recognizable to Germans, East and West. These slogans carried a sharp sense of double entendre that plays to the bittersweet encounter with the once golden West and that can be said to fall into three main tropes of critical significance. The first, exemplified by Kathi and Juwel, implies that things were better in the East and that the West failed to live up to expectations: The baked goods advertisement “The East has chosen” evokes the scorn that Easterners heap on Western bread rolls, whose hard crust contains a light interior that they find airy and “empty” in comparison to the hearty rolls of the East.14 Juwel is far less subtle with its slogan “I already tested the West.” This is

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wordplay with a double target, countering, on one level, the popular Western cigarette brand West, with its infamous and ubiquitous advertising slogan “Test the West,” and, on another level, providing a sarcastic rejoinder to the thinly veiled unification subtext of becoming Western by buying Western goods. The second trope, represented by Karo and f6, deepens the disillusionment and turns bitter. Karo’s “attack on the uniformity of taste” is a harsh pun, since in German “uniformity of taste” can also be read literally as “the taste of unity” (Anschlag auf den Einheitsgeschmack). Last, there is the sense of victimhood and survival in slogans such as Club Cola’s “Hurrah, I’m still alive,” with its eerie echoes of a post-1945 slogan, “Hurra, wir leben noch” (Hurrah, we’re still alive). F6’s slogan “The Taste Remains” can be read as a terse answer to Christa Wolf ’s controversial book, published after the demise of the GDR, entitled What Remains.15 The romanticized East Germany recreated through these products is purposely provocative. They raise questions of authenticity by harking back to a time when the relation of the echt (the real) to the ersatz (the substitute) seemed coherent. The “real” used to be considered characteristic of Western products: real coffee instead of chicory, real orange juice instead of orange flavor, and so on. In this context, even empty soft drink cans famously assumed fetishized roles (after all, Coca-Cola is “the real thing”). The authentic product, linked to the authentic self, was located in the West. Its relics consistently seeped into East German consciousness through advertisements on Western television, gifts from Western relatives in person and in the form of “West packages” sent by mail, and various accounts of visits “over there” by the fortunate few. This view of authentic products is closely connected to East Germans’ experience with commodity fetishism. In spite of official proclamations of victory over commodity fetishism, if anything the socialist system stoked it by constantly depriving and stimulating consumer desire in an ongoing cycle. This cycle had its roots in the relationship between the official circuits of exchange (the “first” economy) and those of the black market (the “second” or underground economy). The second economy was not merely

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parasitic on the first but co-constitutive: without the black market, the official economy would have completely collapsed. The unofficial, if not outright illegal, economy helped to contain the dynamics of stimulation and deprivation caused by the inability of central planning to deliver the promised goods. Yet it also dispersed the market into all aspects of life. Valuable deals, connections, and opportunities could present themselves everywhere and at a moment’s notice (as in the often told anecdote about standing in any line without bothering to ask what it was for, since, if there was a line at all, the items at its origin must be scarce and therefore good), thus creating pent-up consumer desire.16 The transvaluation of Eastern goods from ersatz to echt arrived with the apotheosis of this consumer desire: unification. “Socialism had trained them to desire,” observes John Borneman, “capitalism stepped in to let them buy.”17 The sense of unreality and fantasy brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall was heightened by the type of longing that had placed Eastern socialist promises adjacent to Western consumer projections, thus imbuing each one with the fantasies of the other, as Veenis describes. The first months of unification inaugurated a consumer frenzy that brought to mind Walter Benjamin’s remarks on Paris of the Second Empire, where commodity-saturated customers displayed the intoxicated charm of drug addicts. As with addicts, wrote Benjamin, “commodities derive the same effect from the crowd that surges around and intoxicates them. The concentration of customers which makes the market, which in turns makes the commodity into a commodity, enhances its attractiveness to the average buyer.”18 The German word for frenzy is Rausch, which literally means intoxication. In the immediate aftermath of open borders, intoxicated East Germans used the medium of exchange to immerse themselves in the West. All intoxications are short-lived, of course, and unification did not herald a hybrid Golden Future where fully developed selves lived in harmony. Quite the opposite. The advent of unscrupulous salespersons, scams, and the planned obsolescence of glitzy products quickly dispelled the illusion of material satisfaction as a stage toward a harmonious state of being.

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Accordingly, most Easterners discarded the briefly (albeit intensely) held notion that Western goods were ipso facto echter than Eastern goods. In a rapid turnaround, by the end of 1991, nearly three-quarters of East Germans polled already expressed a preference for Eastern products.19 This set the stage for the ultimate reversal: GDR goods came in many instances to seem more authentic than their contemporary counterparts. The products from the old GDR context became associated with a form of symbolic capital once reserved for the seemingly superior products of the West insofar as they were thought to express an authentic, unalienated relation of self to product. They were, in a certain sense, a type of homecoming, tapping into what one former East German called “a “reservoir of memories deeply anchored in the consciousness of the ex-GDR citizen about the positive side of the GDR and one’s own lived past” and receptive to displaced sites for emotional release: “I broke into tears of joy, good old Rondo,” pronounced a customer upon encountering the reintroduced coffee brand in 1997.20

ECONOMY OF APPEARANCES This sudden switch in the perception of Western goods from real to fake is partially a result of eastern Germans behaving too much like the ideal consumer. They fell for advertisements and felt at once betrayed and wiser as they came to understand that guile is part of advertising. But of course the whole idea of packaging is motivated by the supposition of consumer gullibility. In the West, consumers hover between giving into the seduction of commercials and an awareness that the inside of the package never looks like the picture on the cover. East Germans, however, had to undergo a certain learning process to acquire the necessary “cultural fluency” in their practices of consumption.21 As cultural fluency in consumption grew, it was rapidly accompanied by the institutionalization of former East Germans as a niche market, with marketing firms moving in to track changing tastes. Here, the

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modernist nostalgia for a style of longing under socialism met the Western market desire for customers who identify deeply with their products. The definition of tastes has long been recognized as a form of drawing the borders of identity, which also makes it the foundation for creating a niche market.22 Advertising slogans like the ones previously discussed are, as Conrad Lay notes, a marketer’s dream come true: personal biographies are inseparable from product histories, making it attractive for Western firms to adopt a successful strategy of keeping the original brand name, bringing the quality up to Western standards and only slightly modernizing the appearance.23 The ultimate irony is that many of the Eastern products regarded by consumers as more authentic are owned entirely by Western firms. This situation was driven not only by consumers’ perceptions of quality (real or imagined) but by the sheer inability of East German firms to compete in the new unified German market. From approximately 700 brands, only 120 still existed (or existed once more) in 2009.24 The federal trust agency in charge of privatization liquidated or sold most of the “people’s own” firms that produced East German consumer products, with the result that the best-selling major GDR-era brands today are mostly owned by Western companies, even if in some cases they still produce locally. Juwel, for example, is owned by Phillip Morris, while Club Cola is owned by a Hessen-based (West German) beverage company; f6 is the Phillip Morris subsidiary that produces Juwel and provides an example of the symbiotic relationship between demand for Eastern products and Western marketing (figure 1.3). The f6 cigarette brand, cheerfully explains their public relations department, is actually therapeutic, because it stands for what’s good and trusted from days past and helps with the selfconscious articulation of East German identity. The f6 does not stand for a misunderstood conservatism, rather, this cigarette represents a part of East German cultural history that has come to stand for a significant portion of identity building for the citizens in the new federal lands.  .  .  . Although quality and production have been decisively improved, the f6

26 Y “The Taste Remains” remains exactly the same as it always was: powerful, strong, and incomparably aromatic in taste.25

Thus do the clever, critical, advertising slogans of Eastern products pretend to share in the loss of identity as a strategy to increase market share. The East appears as “exactly the same” yet “decisively improved,” a situation that appeals to any consumer or citizen who fears change but still longs for a better life. Consumers are both attracted and repelled by these transparent tactics of Western firms in Eastern clothing. In an interview from 1996, the cultural critic Horst Groschopp expressed skepticism that East products had a future. Who would go the extra mile for a tube of Chlorodont toothpaste, he wondered, adding, “maybe the toothpaste in the tube isn’t even the original, and the whole things is a marketing trick . . . the Ossi has become very suspicious about such things.” With beer, he said, we

FIGURE 1.3  Cigarettes from Saxony. GDR brand cigarettes Juwel, f6, and Karo, manufactured in Saxony, in their postunification reincarnation after being bought by Phillip Morris. Photo by picture-alliance/ ZB/Martin Schutt.

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“now know” that bottles with local Eastern labels are actually full of Western beer. He immediately qualified this: “at least, that’s the rumor. You never really know what the story is . . . that sets the mood.”26 This suspicion that things are not what they seem to be—your beer is not your beer, your toothpaste is not your toothpaste, and that maybe it’s better like that (“exactly the same” yet “decisively improved”)—is a symptom of a more profound sense of suspicion and disorientation. The dominant figure of postunification Germany was the IM, German initials for the “unofficial informer” for the Ministry for State Security colloquially known as the Stasi. Their existence was no secret during the GDR, but only after the state security files were opened after unification did the scale hit home, in many cases literally. Friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors, it was now painfully clear, had all informed on each other in an absurdist orgy of intimate accounting of everyone else, some with conviction, others giving false or misleading information and thus subverting the system while perpetuating it. Under the rules of openness after unification you could only see your own file, not others, and it was not unreasonable to suspect that anyone, if not everyone, could be something they did not appear to be. And after unification no one really was who they used to be anyway. Some, of course, reinvented themselves more or less legitimately, while other resigned themselves to obsolescence. But, as Groschopp said about where your beer comes from, “You never really know what the story is . . . that sets the mood.”

NOSTALGIA OF STYLE: “ALMOST MODERN AGAIN” The mood was different in the West, however. Even before East products began to make a comeback among former East Germans their design caught the attention of Westerners. Just months before the wall fell, in summer 1989, a small group of Western curators exhibited in Frankfurt the alluringly simple designs of late socialism as it was about to disappear,

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publishing a catalog with the mocking name SED: Stunning Eastern Design, a play on the initials for the communist party (the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or Socialist Unity Party). The catalog text was aggressively snarky, presenting the GDR as a “Galapagos Island of the Design World” that “unwittingly preserved fossils of articles” twenty to thirty years old in a “time-warp zone in which product forms, now obsolescent in the West, could continue to mutate in some frozen limbo,” suffering from “chronic fetish deficit.” The exhibit and catalog was a salvage operation, a self-proclaimed “lightening archaeological excursion into the world of consumer goods before this distinctive quality is submerged beneath the tide of Western goods.”27 This patronizing tone was accompanied by an extreme aestheticization of the products—glossy pages of products abstracted from context and floating against white or pastel backgrounds, at once mocked and elevated by this treatment otherwise reserved for museum-quality objects. Over 230 illustrations of batteries, toothbrushes, cocktail sticks, baby food, tampons, wallpaper, shopping bags, ties, and more form a phantasmagoric image of objects shorn mostly of context other than occasional window display formats. These goods, writes the curators, “appear mundane, curiously unfinished and improvised, and yet, by virtue of their flaws, touchingly human” (12). While GDR products “provoke a feeling of discomfort” and offend “the Western sense of touch” by their lack of “expected smoothness and erotic suppleness,” which makes them “too rubbery and primitive” (9), they also, confesses one of the exhibit organizers, Matthias Dietz, “possess a certain sensous appeal—and they have, in their very simplicity, something that we have lost” (30). Presaging the ironic appropriation of GDR products, the curators quote “a hard-boiled Frankfurt advertising executive” observing: “It seems to me that the exhibits here possess a totally original vitality. An unspoiled naivety. A cigarette brand called “Speechless” is simply miles ahead of any cigarette marketing concepts we have to offer. Design Punk in the GDR is much purer, more idiosyncratic and uncompromising than all our post-modern Memphis pieces” (37).

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It is, as if on cue, precisely these cigarettes (actually cigarillos) that catch the attention of a young, Western, alternative, anticapitalist, squatter five years later in former East Berlin, declaring “Speechless Cigars— that is totally phat [geil]! Cigars that are simply called SPEECHLESS . . . SPEEEECH-LESSSS,” while she leafs through the very same Stunning Eastern Design book.28 As Hilmar Schmundt relates, this squatter known only as “F.” finds inspiration, not condemnation, in GDR design: “it’s totally avant-garde. I know lots of Westerners who totally dig East design. . . . Today it’s almost modern again.” But what really attracts F. and others like her is the “honesty” of GDR design and products when compared to their own world: “GDR design doesn’t try to persuade me about anything—it makes things practically unsellable.” The shabby quality of packaging is both unpractical and human (F. likes how the paper packaging becomes useless clumps when wet), and its negative social standing lends it an in-group intimacy that bonds among those who ironically and knowingly share its secrets. While Groschopp, an older ex-East German, finds something rotten when companies fill Eastern bottles with Western beer, F.’s housemate O., also a young Western transplant to Berlin, fills an old East German Spee washing detergent container with the western German ecologically friendly detergent Frosch (figure 1.4).29 Increasingly, however, the border between Western and Eastern appropriations of GDR products and design blurred with younger generations, especially the alternative scene antinationalist youth. The Western squatters in eastern Berlin who decorated their apartments with GDR paraphernalia and put Western detergent into Eastern containers did not present themselves as Westerners per se. As Schmundt recounts, many squatters were self-appointed pioneers who saw 1990 as their “personal zero hour,” best symbolized perhaps by a cut-up advertisement for the East German communist newspaper “New Germany” (Neues Deutschland) reassembled to read “German Virgin Soil” (Deutsch/es Neu/land).30 At about the same time, Claudia Sadowski-Smith recounts how an Ostalgia party that attracted a massive crowd of eight hundred in the sleepy eastern German city of Lutherstadt Wittenberg had its origins in a few friends’

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FIGURE 1.4  Spee brand washing detergent. GDR-era box. Spee became one of the most well-known objects of ostalgia. Photo: Illustratedjc, Creative Commons License.

decisions “to revive East German products, like their favorite ‘Nordhäuser Doppelkorn’ schnapps, that had disappeared from the unified German market.” The party, one of many of its kind all across the former East, had all the elements of an absurd, if not perverse, acting out of the East: “the crowd was frisked by simulated GDR border police and further harassed with horrendous admission prices and a ‘Zwangsumtausch’ (compulsory exchange) of Deutschmarks into worthless Eastmarks that could only be spent on food and drinks from the vanished GDR.”31 By sarcastically

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simulating what was so recently rejected, Sadowski-Smith saw the Ostalgia party as a venue for a collective identity to be affirmed or created anew among losers of a process with scant other outlets for their sense of loss and identity.32 For the Berlin hipsters and the many Westerners who have since decorated their apartments with GDR kitsch, however, a different yet complementary process is at work, something we can call, following Marilyn Ivy, a nostalgia of style, where the products and images emanate “no explicit appeal to return, no acute sense of loss, and no reference to embodied memory.” Rather, they are a “glib evocation of vanished commodity forms” that detaches the specificity of the past from its material signifiers.33 The Berlin hipster is not seeking to empathize with Eastern identity, but to use the aura of its artifacts to create a “free-floating past” that can be reassembled and redeployed like the advertisement for Neues Deutschland. We thus find two, seemingly contradictory, forms of nostalgia at work in Ostalgia as it emerged around disappearing Eastern products: a modernist nostalgia based on a longing for a style of longing and a nostalgia of style based on separating the object from any prescribed sense of longing. In their contradictory ways, both end up enabling a similar outcome: the reproduction in various forms of “vanished” artifacts that acquire (willingly or not) the label nostalgic. Nostalgia in market societies requires commodification, because that is the primary way in which objects circulate in societies where consumption functions as “a privileged site for the fabrication of self and society, of culture and identity,” especially under conditions of anxiety and uncertainty.34

TRICKS OF THE TRADE A hallmark of Ostalgia culture in both its modernist and postmodern form (nostalgia of style) is its pervasive, self-conscious irony, starting with the neologism ostalgia itself. Even in the most serious of exhibits or store displays there is humor that serves to dislodge the slogans, symbols, and

FIGURE 1.5  East packet. East packet flyer for the shop Ostpaket. “East Packets” are

a play on the so-called West packets that families in West Germany used to send to relatives in the East during the division. Today they are used mostly as gifts and come in dozens of variations. 2016. Author’s collection.

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styles of the regime and make them usable as contemporary persiflage. In the apartments of hipsters, GDR flags became shower curtains, and tourist shops sell iconic brightly colored plastic eggcups, model Trabant cars, magnets with phrases such as “Wessi Free Zone,” and the ubiquitous green and red Ampelmann (traffic light men) products. A specialty store’s very name Ostpaket (East Packet) plays on the phenomenon of “West packages” (Westpakete) sent by relatives from West to East during GDR times. Its logo is the iconic Trabant against a silhouetted map of the GDR accompanied by the motto “good things from the East!” and it offers several ironic varieties of East packets for consumer to send as gift baskets (figure 1.5).35 Similarly, the company Ostprodukte Versand (East product shipping) offers a “Hero of Labor” set of six products, including Hero shower gel, a bottle opener, and a certificate that adapts socialist language, for example: “The superhuman and exemplary tasks rendered by the bearer of this honorary title are worthy of emulation and continuous improvement. To learn from the hero is to learn victory,” echoing the famous GDR slogan “To learn from the Soviet Union means to learn victory.” Humor accompanies East products in all its stages, from knowingly ironic appropriations, clever names, tongue-in-cheek advertising, and novelty products to redeployment of socialist slogans such as condoms bearing the Young Pioneers motto “be prepared—always prepared!” or GDR schnapps in four flavors: Agitator, Proletariat, Subotnik, and Black Channel, all under the motto: Never Backwards, Always Plastered!36 (See figure 1.6) Humor, of course, works to strip official symbols of once feared power.37 This was especially important in the early years after the GDR’s collapse, when sarcasm was tinged with schadenfreude and the recently toppled structures needed to be dismantled discursively as well as administratively. In one sense, East products at their most ironic are the very opposite of nostalgia, conventionally conceived as abject longing: rather they convey the open expression of the kind of humor and irony that coursed through GDR society through countless jokes for which the GDR is justly famous. The absurdity, pettiness, and moral bankruptcy of the regime was the constant butt of jokes that turned ideological somberness backed by force into caustic caricatures emptied of their

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FIGURE 1.6  Ostalgie schnapps. The motto Never Backwards, Always Plastered! is

a pun on the slogan Never Backwards, Always Forwards used by Erich Honecker. 2009. Photo by author.

self-importance.38 East products play on these once sacred images and slogans, turning busts of leaders and emblems of power into paperweights, gags, and reversals. Such sarcasm is a form of transgression after the fact, since the GDR leaders are no longer around to become inflamed when their human flaws are exposed through mockery. Yet while the power of these symbols diminishes it also lingers, and even more than two decades after the GDR’s disappearance the ironic use of GDR symbols can elicit an angry response. In 2010, members of the conservative political party the Christian Democratic Union (the CDU), in power for most of the first two decades after reunification, called for a ban on all GDR symbols as “antidemocratic” (verfassungsfeindlich, literally, hostile to the constitution) and “supremely

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insulting and injurious for all victims of the SED regime.” “Nazi symbols were also banned for good reasons,” says Kai Wegner, a member of parliament from the western Berlin suburb of Spandau. “We cannot forget the past,” agreed the head of the CDU youth organization, calling for the use of logos of the former Ministry for State Security, National Peoples Army, and the ruling Socialist Unity Party to be subject to punishment.39 This CDU demand shows one of the key contemporary boundaries of social acceptance that ostalgia troubles with its ironic, commodified forms: the memory politics of Germany’s identity, especially the question of comparison between the Nazi and communist past—a central theme discussed further in the next chapter. The accusation that ostalgia amounts to apology for both dictatorships is always raised by critics, such as a fairly typical letter to the editor responding to an article on ostalgia in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “Would the ostalgia-interested reader also seek further historical-emotional experiences in a Gestapo suite or in the [Nazi] Reich’s party convention lounge, which also had Kathreiner’s Karo Coffee (grain beverage) with folksy stews [volkstümliche Eintopfessen] and Chlorodont toothpaste in the bathroom?”40 A commonplace remark after the success of the 2003 film Good-bye Lenin, which pushed ostalgia into the mainstream, was about how hard it would be to imagine “Good-bye Hitler.” The film provoked those who saw in Good-bye Lenin a dangerous reduction of GDR symbols to harmless, miniaturized forms of kitsch. Though this might seem a venial sin, for those disturbed by ostalgia it undermined government-sanctioned rituals of memory by making the GDR past more accepted, more mobile, and less controllable and raising anew the older trope of German susceptibility to “antidemocratic” sentiments. In this context the CDU demand to criminalize GDR-era symbols draws attention to how ostalgia irony works against the implicit comparison of the fascist and the socialist past simply by making it possible to make fun of the one and not the other. Ostalgia, then, gains its force in part by crossing the line that separates good and bad taste at both the social and aesthetic level. It also (re)draws the line(s) by creating intimacies and in-groups (“Wessi Free Zone!”) as

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well as by erasing or moving the line (e.g., “Wossis,” a word that combines pejorative terms for Easterners and Westerners). This boundary crossing/drawing/moving function is characteristic of the mythical spirit or archetype of the trickster.41 Ostalgia, of course, is not a mythic figure in the sense of Hermes or the coyote. It may be a category error to think of a phenomenon as a “trickster” in the strict sense, since a phenomenon lacks the agency of an archetypal protagonist. And yet ostalgia is suffused with a humor-filled, underdog spirit that prods and needles straitlaced interpretations of the GDR past. It is hard to pin down what it really means, and in ostalgia one sees the traces of the socialist-era mimetic practice of stiob (a Russian term), a form of parody that drew its strength from the ambiguity over whether the actor was being sincere or ridiculing the powers that be (or both).42 This could be maddening for those who don’t “get” it. As Ivor Stodolsky points out, “stiob’s ‘unhinging’ effect derives mainly from a momentary mis-recognition of sincerity.”43 We see this in the media and academic debates about ostalgia, forever asking whether the purveyors or customers of ostalgia products are themselves nostalgic. Is the joke on them because they are misguided, or on the critics for taking them too seriously? When people making and selling kitschy ostalgia products claim what they are doing is not part of ostalgia, how are we to understand this? Perhaps a clue can be found in the philosopher Konrad Liessmann’s analysis of kitsch as a “subversive aesthetic strategy.” Kitsch, in Liessmann’s analysis, is a double movement: in its naive sentimentality it seeks to “get back that which modernity refuses us . . . to enjoy what the radical modern and the political enlightenment wanted to deny” and is thus inherently antielite. To “enjoy” kitsch qua kitsch, however, requires a minimum of self-distancing in the form of irony. Kitsch, in the standard analysis, is dangerous because it speaks directly to maudlin human emotions that threaten to blunt our capacity for judgment. Yet, writes Liessmann, it “requires only a wink to become beyond reproach, that is, to become acceptable.”44 This irony ameliorates kitsch’s inherent danger, turning bad taste into something so bad it is good again.

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In the spirit of the trickster then, if not as a quasi-trickster itself, ostalgia performs two social trickster functions through the deployment of irony and humor: First, it interrupts the establishment of smooth narratives, opening space for rearticulations and reversals, wordplay and iconoclasm. This is classic trickster territory, known as disarticulation—the removing of an object from its predictable place, whether it is the past where East products were said to belong and not today’s store shelf, or the normative spaces such as schools or museums where the emblems and images of the Communist dictatorship are supposed to be encountered and not, say, on chocolates or condoms. Second, once disarticulated, ostalgia serves to reinsert objects into the mainstream as commodities. The more “normal” these products come to seem, whether as part of the souvenir landscape or as regional products, the more they disavow their very exceptionalism, ultimately losing the very scent of nostalgia as such. Following Lewis Hyde’s analysis of the trickster, we can see this as rearticulation, in which the story, here the GDR past, is connected in new ways to “larger social and spiritual articulations.”45 The trickster at work: on the one hand, ostalgia redraws the boundaries depending on where you stand—communist sympathizers versus defenders of the constitution, Ossis versus Wessis, postnationalist Wossi hipsters versus those who still think of themselves in national terms. On the other, it moves and blurs the lines, as when an anonymous contributor to an online forum wrote, after viewing the film Good-bye Lenin, “and what am I really: an Ossi? a Wessi? A Wossiossi, ossiwossi, WOSI, Ostelbiger, Oderwestlicher? I myself do not know anymore,” or in the detaching of the object from its original context and letting it float “free” of its former political content, as with ironic appropriations of symbols on T-shirts and tourist products.46 In the pop culture designs, we can see the workings of what Serguei Oushakine calls the “retrofitting” of socialist symbols, which in their new guises “offer a recognizable outline without suggesting an obvious ideological strategy of its interpretation.”47 This allows socialist symbols to be redeployed in new contexts and for new

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generations. More to the point, ostalgia as trickster allows GDR identity to remain in circulation, neither fully dissolving nor persisting into the new era. Ostalgia becomes part of modern rituals of consumption, and by staying at that level, rather than being incorporated into formal rituals such as school, flag, or political speeches, it allows forms of GDR identity to persist and be questioned at the same time.

SOCIALIST IN FORM, NATIONAL IN CONTENT? 48 Ironically, so to speak, the term ostalgia is seldom used by those directly involved in what we can call the nostalgia industry. For example, the proprietor of the Ostpaket store “flew into a rage” at a journalist’s mention of the word, countering that “when someone in the West uses Nivea cream one doesn’t call him Westalgic.”49 An annoyed contributor to a 2010 online forum about Eastern products complained how “Ostalgia is a Wessi-concept for defaming people whose right to their home [Heimat] is resented for arrogant, ignorant, bigoted, consumption-addled, socially insensitive, and politically charged reasons.”50 The store Ost-Best bills itself as “iconic, not toxic” (kultig nicht giftig). Rather than seeing themselves as ostalgic, the specialty stores that could be said to be at the commercial heart of the industry present themselves as engaged in an earnest historical mission. In conversations, printed interviews, and their own materials, these store proprietors repeatedly disavow ostalgia, claiming simply to give the people what they want and keeping alive, as the store Ostprodukte Versand puts it, “affectionate memories of how, alongside the Wall, there was much loveliness [so viel Schönes] in our own country.”51 Similar to the museums explored in the next chapter, these commercial entrepreneurs see themselves as providing a vital social function of transmitting history to the next generation. Accordingly, these specialty store’s Web sites contain history sections with photos, guides to GDR currency or official abbreviations, lyrics to the GDR national anthem,

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as well as trivia contests, editorials, and links to GDR-themed sites. Ostpaket, whose proprietor reacted so harshly to the term ostalgia, has created its own minimuseum, called “East Times” (Ostzeit), which seeks “to keep alive memories of forty years of living and working in the GDR.”52 To this end, the store asks its customers to loan it objects along with stories to accompany the objects, for example, “on my turntable is the record by the band AMIGA, like it was when I got my first kiss!” This self-appointed role of store as unofficial historian can be interpreted as a response not only to generational shifts in historical experience but also to the shifting of East products’ trickster quality as they become increasingly marketed as regional products, gaining a new form of legitimacy. This is especially the case for foodstuffs (e.g., chocolate, beer, mustard) and household products, which follow specific marketing strategies aimed at regional identities (except for alcohol brands, which are among the few to have nationwide recognition).53 The national chain store Penny Markt, for example, stocks Eastern products in approximately 30 percent of its shelves in its almost six hundred eastern German branches, indicated by signs with the slogan “Eastern is Delicious,” using an adjective that also means “exquisite” (Östlich ist köstlich).54 Many of these goods can be found in East products trade fairs that travel around the former GDR three or four times a year. Unlike other trade shows, these seem less focused on wholesalers and more on retail customers, serving to promote goods from the former GDR region. They charge low admissions prices to the general public—2 Euros (about $1.50) at the one I visited in Berlin on a gray and raw April morning in 2013, a long line of people snaking outside the Velodrome with the smoke from sausage stalls starting to waft up into the cold air. My neighbor in line, an older woman from former East Berlin, did not find the admission price reasonable: “Goodness gracious [Herrje],” she exclaimed, “it’s become so expensive.” Ostalgia was present in a small number of stalls selling novelty products, the GDR flag used as a tablecloth at the snack area, and a plastic kitchen item salesman dressed as a GDR-era policeman (“some people are upset,” he told me, “but mostly they just smile”) (figure 1.7). Yet it felt

FIGURE 1.7  East products trade fair. Salesman dressed as “People’s Police” at the

East Products Trade Fair. Berlin, 2013. Photo by author.

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more like ostalgia was being used to signify something that holds the various regional products together—honey and jam, leather bags and reclining chairs, linseed oil, organic soap, and specialty cakes (Baumkuchen), among many others. Following a national trend toward buying local, GDR-era brands successfully give the impression of helping the struggling local economy, which is a reason often cited by consumers for purchasing them.55 Thus some products are redesigned to seem even more local than they are, like mustard from Bautzen (also the site of infamous prisons), known in the GDR as Bautzener Senf and rebranded after being purchased by a Bavarian company as “Bautzn’er Senf ” with the apostrophe suggesting a colloquial, folksy image. The brands are gently disconnected from the GDR by a renewed emphasis on the prewar roots of many products, such as the Spreewald brand pickles made famous by Good-bye Lenin and almost universally identified with the GDR, but which, it turns out, had received a very early product endorsement in the writings of Theodore Fontane at the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the case where a product originated in the GDR, such as Nudossi hazelnut spread, which came into production near Dresden in 1970, some of its defenders claim it was already enjoyed in the Weimar Republic and therefore older than the “cheap sugar paste” Nutella, leading one irked Easterner to assert that not only do “western Germans have no sense of quality” but that to condemn it for being Eastern is as absurd as criticizing Goethe and Schiller, who also “spent much of their time in ‘East Germany.’ ”56 A promotion for Sternquell beer combined both, harking back to history and ostalgia by celebrating its 150th anniversary with a toy car and the tag line “Youth dreams in the GDR. Where you find your first love again” (see figure 1.8). As GDR artifacts are progressively commodified, they are thus increasingly bifurcated, less between East and West and more between regional and kitsch products, between those that earnestly reinsert the GDR past into German history (by connecting, for example, Spreewald pickles with Fontane or Nudossi with Goethe) and those that assert the right to use humor to keep in circulation formerly sacred emblems and

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FIGURE 1.8  Promotion for Sternquell beer. Commemorating its 150th anniversary,

the copy reads: “Where you find your ‘first love’ again: youth dreams in the GDR.” Berlin 2013. Photo by author.

slogans. In a reversal of the old Soviet slogan that countries should be free to develop products “socialist in content, national in form,” the bestselling East products are increasingly national in content, and (superficially) socialist in their marketing form. In Olga Shevchenko and Maya Nadkarni’s treatment of nostalgia in postsocialist Hungary and Russia, they locate its power within the ability of politicians to generate political capital out of nostalgic content.57 In the German case, the ostalgia phenomenon has been decidedly less directly connected to the machinations of party politics, especially for successor parties to the former communists. Rather, in the German case, we see nostalgia functioning as a popular-cultural form of transmitting cultural knowledge. Commodification, the chapter has argued, plays a key role by marking representative items from a past era, usually from

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everyday life, as valuable (both literally and figuratively) and allowing them to remain or reenter circulation through the market, giving them both legitimacy and a precariousness that requires additional symbolic investment to keep them alive and profitable. In seeking to understand how everyday objects become nostalgia objects by acquiring new forms of value, I am neither arguing that commodification is somehow a good in itself nor making a claim about the relative value or substance of cultural knowledge transmitted through nostalgia objects (e.g., whether the representations are historically accurate). Rather, the exemplary case of ostalgia shows how nostalgia products can function as a semiotically ambiguous repertoire in cases of transition, aiming simultaneously at the old and the new. Through commodification and new forms of representational value, ostalgia has become recognized, if grudgingly, as a fixture in the larger landscape of German memory politics, accepted but not necessarily acceptable. This recognition manifests, as often as not, in rejection of the term itself by Germans (of all ideological stripes) as at best insufficient and at worst inimical for the task of doing justice to the lived experience of the GDR. Yet the widespread presence of GDR-themed consumer items in shops, combined with a robust nostalgia industry in the form of tourist attractions, embeds ostalgia in this objectified form in the German consumer and tourist topography. In this sense, we may be able to speak of ostalgia as a social fact. Thus, more than a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we find Berlin’s tourist office promoting the DDR Museum (the German acronym for the GDR), where “the kitchen still has the cooking smells of way back when,” and the Trabi Safari where you can drive the cult cars from the old days. The old East German Ampelmännchen street crossing signals are found throughout the West and form the basis for an international brand with a chain of shops from Berlin to Tokyo. The Japanese Ampelmann Web site presents them as the “symbol of traffic safety, German unification, and resurrection” and sells their image on everything from lamps to noodles.58 “Eastern product” shops like Ostpaket do a respectable business in the mid six figures,

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plying over seven hundred items, and tourists can stay in Berlin’s GDRthemed hotel, Ostel, taking in the hit East-West love story musical Beyond the Horizon, while more determined visitors can celebrate the GDR’s anniversaries in the town of Tutow’s GDR Museum with dancing and soljanka soup served in genuine Mitropa bowls. Yet, however socially recognizable it becomes, ostalgia is unlikely to ever become fully socially acceptable and transcend its negative connotations as trivializing, campy, and kitsch. In the German case, where national identity is founded on a “will to memory,” ostalgia functions as an insolent interjection to the “injunction to remember.”59 Trickster-like in its alternately innocent and ironic representations, ostalgia subtly undermines the redemptive quality of collective memory as a national project under the guidance of professional historians and state commissions. As Gil Eyal has written, collective memory in Germany is central to the state and its institutions as a guarantor of identity and a healer of wounds.60 Ostalgia dislodges symbols of this project, prodding established identities and scratching at the wounds. Nostalgia allows the symbolic content of collective memory to be reappropriated by companies, and consumers, rather than the hermeneutic guardians of culture and history. It keeps the past, to borrow Marilyn Ivy’s phrase, “on the verge of vanishing, stable yet endangered (and thus open for commodifiable desire).”61 By simultaneously seeking in this way to overcome and retain its own past, nostalgia tugs at our conscience, even as we enjoy its (guilty) pleasures.

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veryday life, that deceptively simple set of quotidian familiarities, is a difficult domain for coming to terms with the past. The last chapter explored how the ostalgia phenomenon is propelled by the commodified appropriation of seemingly innocent consumer items of daily life, juxtaposed and conflated with once sacred symbols of the regime. The sharp criticism that Ostalgie receives, from calls to ban GDRera symbols to widespread contempt and condescension, is indicative of a deeper dilemma connected to the unavoidable complicity of everyday life in any governing order. Whether under colonialism, socialism, or modern consumer culture, everyday life is inextricably woven into ideological and economic webs and scarcely evident to its own subjects. As W. E. B. DuBois wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, “a blameless, beautiful, cultured young woman in a London suburb may be the foundation on which is built the poverty and degradation of the world.” The everyday life of this woman, he argues, rests on deep complicity in structures of which she is dimly aware. “For this” he writes, “someone is guilty as hell. Who?”1 Du Bois was critiquing the neocolonial capitalist world for its seductive separation of the private and the political that allowed the “blameless” woman in London to be the foundation for poverty abroad. The GDR was built on anticolonialist rhetoric that was supposed to resolve exactly the kinds of complicity that Du Bois condemned. If capitalism mystified its ideology, socialism sought to give ideology nowhere to hide,

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erasing the distinction between the private and political. Accordingly, and optimistically, it hoped that by recasting everyday life as explicitly political, capitalist alienation would dissolve into the logic and ethics of the collective. This had, of course, a major impact on the objects of everyday life, which under socialism were no longer objects of individual initiative or exchange, but rather carriers of the utmost ideological importance. “Consumption is not a process of needing something and getting it,” pronounced the former GDR economics minister, Günther Mittag, “but a process by which the socialist personality is created.”2 State socialism doggedly campaigned to demystify the everyday from what it saw as the false consciousness of commodity fetishism. In this context, chronic production problems famously led to, as Vladislav Todorov neatly put it, “a deficit of goods, but an overproduction of symbolic meaning.” This combination, he writes, created “ultimately effective aesthetic structures and ultimately defective economic ones.”3 One result was a different inflection of the meaning of everyday life under socialism than in Western capitalist societies. In the West the everyday colloquially summons an image of a private sphere of routine and habit, such as family, shopping, and quotidian tasks, characterized by a combination of choice and constraint. It is precisely this combination that makes the everyday a site of both ideological intervention (constraint) and autonomy (choice). Western cultural analysis, following largely continental theorists, has accordingly come to regard the everyday as both a location for the devious workings of capitalism at the level of the social unconscious (reproduction) and a space of resistance or secondary production, to use Michel de Certeau’s term for how new meanings accrue to objects and images by users who are not their makers.4 Consequently, the everyday in Western critical theory becomes a privileged site of resistance and agency in the context of capitalist modernity. Under socialism, however, the everyday is less easily read as a potentially redemptive space of resistance to ideology. Of course the everyday

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had subversive and oppositional functions; this is amply demonstrated through various types of actions that can be read as resistance, from retreats into apolitical spaces such as the dacha or the honing of ambiguous humorous tactics such as stiob.5 Similarly, in the West the everyday was a key space for reinforcing or transgressing the lines between private and public. In contrast, the very erasure of private space was a state goal, and everyday culture was saturated with political meaning. Whereas in the West everyday life takes the form of a mystification in which the diffuse ideology of the market permeates daily life in subtle ways, in the Socialist Bloc everyday life meant finding ways for citizens to make porous the state’s claim to dominance without, in most cases, calling attention to one’s self. The overtly politicized and ideological context of the socialist everyday immediately confronts any retroactive assessment of the GDR with the stark contradictions of a society where everyday life simultaneously consolidated, skirted, and subverted the dictatorship. In 2005–6 the so-called Sabrow expert commission, expanding on a previous parliamentary commission, examined the official status of GDR memory and found the treatment of everyday life profoundly missing in attempts to understand and explain the GDR, particularly the production of loyalty and resistance.6 This lack was especially prominent in the cultural institutions dealing with the GDR. The commission’s eponymous chair, historian Martin Sabrow, argued that “the everyday is not the opposite of dictatorial rule, but its complement,” echoing the work of historian Alf Lüdtke on the Third Reich and casting those who would deny this complementarity in poor historical company.7 The Sabrow Commission documented the sidestepping of the everyday in most museum exhibits and historical dialogues and its exclusion from the standard repertoire of working through the socialist past (Aufarbeitung).8 Precisely because of the inevitable complicity inherent in the habits and habitus of everyday life under socialism, its representation was a fraught matter, often hastily equated with apology for the socialist regime and largely avoided by the historical mainstream during the first

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two decades after unification. Yet ignoring the lived experience of sixteen million former East Germans would hardly do justice to understanding the recent past. “To treat everyday life as a realm of experience unavailable for representation or reflection,” cautions Ben Highmore, “is to condemn it to silence.”9 This chapter concerns the way in which the socialist everyday has been made, to borrow Highmore’s term, available for representation. It looks at amateur, privately funded museums of everyday life under socialism, which arose to supplement and challenge state-supported representations of the GDR in professional history museums. Extending the focus on objects of everyday life in chapter 1, it follows socialist material culture as it shifted from unwanted excess to museum artifacts and, in the process, drew ordinary people into contact with political and scholarly debates concerning the “correct” way to remember life under the socialist regime. The chapter traces how a ragtag group of collectors evolved into a museum landscape. While commonly criticized for their amateurish and nostalgic qualities, the private museums explored in this chapter also function as a form of antipolitics at a time when many ex-GDR citizens confronted feelings of powerlessness over the rapid dominance of Western political and media institutions. I show how their tactile, interactive, and informal modes of representation are a form of appropriation that allows them to claim the important mantle of authenticity. This quality, I argue, enables these private museums to play an active role in making the socialist everyday available for representation through material culture. In this way they form a notable early phase in the larger, ongoing process of incorporating the everyday into working through the past as it has belatedly but steadily moved into public view.

PICKING UP THE PIECES In the immediate years after unification, all across the former GDR citizens purged their products, appliances, clothes, cars, and documents.

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They “could not get rid of their everyday stuff fast enough,” a stunned Westerner observed while wandering through a landscape in which “everyday culture had been indiscriminately tossed overboard like ballast, from work brigade books and party insignia to coming of age gifts and many other things.”10 This massive cleansing was the corollary to a collective effervescence of consumption that accompanied the currency union between West and East Germany in February 1990, when Eastern stores switched their inventories to Western products literally overnight. For months shelves were stocked and restocked at breakneck speed in response to the massive pent-up consumer desire endemic to socialist economies of scarcity. As a consequence, not only did consumers at first privilege Western products, as detailed in the previous chapter, but fully functional everyday GDR objects instantly became culturally obsolete and wended their way into the trash or attic. During that first unification year, residents of GDR territory produced 1.2 tons of garbage per capita, three times that of the West.11 Anything Eastern seemed suddenly inferior. Items that once occupied high status in the East were suddenly next to worthless. As the joke went at the time, a man stops at a garage on the highway and asks the mechanic for two windshield wipers for his (East German) Trabant car. The mechanic replies: “That’s a fair trade.” While the material life of a dead nation state disappeared into dumpsters, attics, and storage spaces, a motley crew of mostly middle-aged males, gripped by anxiety at the suddenness of change, began to collect remnants of everyday life from trash heaps, abandoned buildings, friends, and neighbors. This often took the form of a consciously desperate attempt to grasp the past as it slipped away before their eyes. Collectors combed flea markets, stores, trash, and industrial sites for packages of dry goods, Communist Party–related paraphernalia, certificates, postcards, bottles of soda, appliances, cups and saucers, furniture, record albums, and instruction manuals, doing the hard work to wrench the everyday from the fringes. The first phase of the afterlife of socialist everyday objects is inseparable from this garbage moment that spurred the collector culture. The “key

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moment” (Schlüsselerlebnis) that turned Wolfgang Max into a private collector of now over twenty-five hundred objects, from dozens of cameras to hundreds of uniforms, came when a friend called to tell him of a uniform being thrown in the garbage.12 A 1991 newspaper photo of books rotting in a garbage dump near Leipzig prompted the evangelical pastor Martin Weskott to rescue eventually fifty thousand books, alarmed at how “people were tempted to toss their own biographies, so to speak, along with garbage into the dump.”13 The inveterate collector, Jürgen Hartwig, stretching out his arms with clenched fists, illustrated to me how, during the unification year, he would collect bags and bags of DDR “stuff ” from the streets and shops on his way to and from his night shift at a light bulb factory, fretful because he “knew it would soon disappear.” Hartwig was a former East German locksmith who found his calling during an epiphany over Christmas 1989 when he realized the past—his past, which had been preserved behind the wall, was on the verge of disappearing and he must begin to collect it. He was living in West Berlin at the time, having been forcibly expelled after serving two years in a GDR jail for trying to leave the country illegally. Suddenly, preserving for posterity the remains of the country that ejected him became a major motive. He cofounded and served as the president of the Association for the Documentation of GDR Everyday Culture, which has run a swap meet every month for over twenty years at the formerly prominent GDR Café Sybille, where (mostly) men sit at a back table, drink beer and coffee, and trade postcards, coins, stories, and jokes. These acts of collecting gave the everyday objects a combination of two values that began to transform trash into objects of nostalgia. The first value that accrued to the object through collecting was survival. With the “death” of the GDR came a widespread sense of people becoming strangers in their own land or permanently estranged from a past that defined their identity. The collectors engage in salvage as a way of ordering time and space, of reorganizing the suddenly drastically disorganized present. One collector explained the heady rush of salvage as an irresistible impulse “to hoard and to hoard, because time is running

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out. . . . I want above all to brutally collect and unsystematically hoard everything.”14 In a context where many eastern Germans felt that “there was no time to say good-bye” (the title of a 1995 collector’s exhibit), objects became, as Baudrillard wrote, “the thing with which we construct our own mourning” and thus symbolically transcend death.15 In the work of mourning called forth by the “death” of the GDR, the act of collecting became one way of surviving.16 The second value was intersubjective worth—the value of recognition of another’s desire for your object. Collectors began to understand how their own past could literally fetch a price, and learned to play their own sense of self-worth in the dance around monetary value. The monetary value of GDR items remains unspectacular compared with antiques from earlier periods, with the priciest objects falling into conventional categories such as coins, currency, and stamps. Yet the very notion that one’s material past can fetch a price began to change self-perception, allowing for knowingly ironic reversals and newfound fluency with commodity culture. For example, an East Berliner recalled how, shortly after unification, he saw a Westerner buying badges at a flea market and realized with a sudden flash of insight that his own old school badges and medals, buried in boxes somewhere, to which he had never given a second thought, might fetch hard cash. More or less on a lark, he invited the Westerner to his home to show him his badges.17 When the Westerner asks, “how much for everything?” the response is a mixture of melodrama, irony, and business acumen: I stood up, breathed deeply, sat down, and whispered: “That is my past, how can you convert it into money?” “How much?” “You tell me.” “Hundred.” I laid a cloth over the objects. The effect was stunning. As soon as he couldn’t see what he desired, he increased his offer by two and half times. I said: “I won’t let it go for under three hundred.” Fast as a pickpocket he

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The point, of course, is not that some GDR everyday items can, as with the badges, fetch some small cash, but that desire expressed by others produces an enhanced sense of the worth of one’s own past and that the clever deployment of this perception can lead to role reversals and notions of value. Together the two values—personal/cultural survival and intersubjective worth—allowed a process of self-inscription in objects similar to what anthropologist David Parkin observes among persons whose sense of social self is disrupted by displacement.18 When refugees are forced into exile, according to Parkin, they bring mementos with them that are much more than mere objects. Because exiles find themselves in liminal situations where trust in others is weakened because of a loss of self, they “inscribe their sense of a personal future and identity in whatever remains to hand of impersonal physical, mental and bodily bricolage: to invest emotionally, in other words, in accessible objects, ideas and dreams rather than in the living people around one.”19 Mementos become repositories of “temporarily encapsulated personhood” to be called upon later, when conditions allow, to reconstitute in some future form the erstwhile disavowed identity.20 The curious condition of former East Germans who were “dis/re/located from Germany to Germany” created an analogous identity crisis, not because they had left their country but because their country had left them.21 This is a condition independent of political persuasion—whether you were a dissident or an apparatchik, your daily life was irrevocably altered. As the apt title of Alexei Yurchak’s book about the last Soviet generation puts it: “Everything was forever, until it was no more.” “The system,” notes Yurchak, “was always felt to be both stagnating and immutable, fragile and vigorous, bleak and full of promise,” and then it was gone.22 For East Germans, not only was the old system abruptly discontinued, but the entire country was literally absorbed into the legal, political, and cultural structures of the western Federal Republic. Unlike in other Soviet

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Bloc countries, the GDR’s plodding regime and its daily regiments were instantly replaced by a full-fledged alternative system. Everyday objects instantly became culturally obsolete and assumed the role of trace and remainder of the rapid disappearance of a state and its attendant ways of life. For those collectors like Hartwig, everyday objects became, in his words, anchors for a “reservoir of memories . . . about the positive side of the GDR and one’s own lived past.”23 Parkin’s observation on the role of objects as carriers for “temporarily encapsulated personhood” is apposite in this context. This helps explain an evident tenderness toward the objects, such as in collector Rolf Winkler’s self-description of his collection: “After unification [die Wende] things we once lived with, worked with, played with and loved were dumped, destroyed, discarded, or simply abandoned. These were everyday necessities from our households, schools, jobs, hobbies, as well as things the world didn’t need. My small collection aims to revive and preserve such memories. . . . Not everything was bad!”24

FROM TRASH TO ARTIFACT Winkler’s collection, presented to the world via his personal Web site, is part of a shift that took place in the mid-90s from collecting to exhibiting the objects. In 1994 Hartwig, wanting to share his collecting experience with former East Germans, expressed the hope that some future museum “that documents history and everyday culture will later awaken a great interest.”25 Around this time, collectors began to search for permanent homes for exhibiting their collections. Private museums began to sprout in basements, garages, homes, barracks, and former factories. With no access to public money, they usually formed private nonprofits in the German sense of “common-use societies” ( gemeinnützige Vereine), which allows them to raise funds through membership fees, contributions, and admissions. In addition to their own collections, they placed public calls for the donation of artifacts. By the turn of the century, private museums of everyday life in the GDR numbered around two dozen.26

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MAP 2.1  Location of GDR Everyday Life museums.

Among the very first museums was the Open Depot, which turned into the Documentation Center for Everyday Culture of the GDR in the city of Eisenhüttenstadt, emerging originally from a short-lived collaboration between the less orderly Hartwig and the scholarly West Berlin curator Andreas Ludwig.27 Hartwig and Ludwig were both enamored of the idea of a museum of the socialist everyday. Ludwig suggested creating an association (Verein) as the basis for raising money for a future museum to be located in the quintessentially socialist model city of Eisenhüttenstadt. Soon two dozen enthusiasts gathered in early 1994 at the oldstyle Berlin restaurant Mutter Hoppe to found the Society for the Documentation of GDR Everyday Culture (figure 2.1). It was a chaotic

FIGURE 2.1  Newsletter from the Society for the Documentation of GDR Everyday Culture. Early editions of the newsletter from 1996. Author’s collection.

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organization, which elicited plaintive calls to professionalize its collecting habits: “Please give details and dates, otherwise it’s worthless!” ran one plea for its members. An early attempt to mount an exhibit was equally chaotic, leading Hartwig to chide the members: “our collectors should not ignore invitations to meetings and try very hard not to miss appointments!”28 By 1998 Ludwig couldn’t take the dilettantish nature of the association anymore, and he left to realize his own museum, the Documentation Center for GDR Everyday Culture, which mounted well-respected, professionally curated exhibits until its loss of funding in 2012. Ludwig’s museum, however, was a hard-fought island of professional curation in a suddenly widening sea of amateur museums. More typical for the amateur museums is the GDR Museum Pirna, where the founder, Conny Kaden, began collecting numismatics in 1993 and realized that a few years later his small fifty-square-meter apartment resembled a museum—“everywhere stood radios, toys, and medals, the bookcases were piled with GDR books, and the walls in the corridor and kitchen hung GDR and Pioneer flags and every morning our former politicians smiled down at me.”29 In 2004 he opened the museum, which today occupies two thousand square meters in a former military barracks. As with Kaden or Winkler, most museums take the form of personal shrine usually presided over by a charismatic individual with no clear plan for disposition of the artifacts after the museum closes.30 These shrine-style museums are literally transitional, their existence tied to the biography and biology of their founders, most of whom came of age during the cold war, whose relation to the objects displayed is visceral and intimate. Taken together, these museums represent generational and epochal memories that form the kind of “we-identity” often associated with the political memory of nations.31 Handmade signs often direct the visitor to these museums, which, more often than not, lie off the beaten path. Nearly all of them welcome you “back” to the GDR, combining the old trope of the museum as a substitute for travel with imagery of the GDR border (figures 2.2 and 2.3). In the museum at the edge of town in Perleberg, for example, the

FIGURE 2.2  Entry ticket to the Zeitreise Museum. The ticket is in the form of a visa

to enter the GDR. 2009. Photo by author.

FIGURE 2.3  Flyer for GDR Museum Kampehl. “GDR Memories” says this handmade flyer, “Everyday items from consumption, communication, improvisation, health, paper, and typesetting. . . . Follow the directions on the original GDR Konsum shopping cart.” 2009. Author’s collection.

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part-time worker behind the desk greets you with an immigration question: “Would you like to enter the country?” (“Möchten Sie einreisen?”) and for three Euros you receive a fake visa that serves as your ticket. At the center of all the museums are objects predominantly drawn from the household and consumer experience, foregrounding the aesthetics of the everyday. Collections of clothes, cleaning supplies, bottles, bandages, blenders, radios, and televisions vie with powdered pudding packets and toasters. Sewing machines lead to schoolbooks next to toy soldiers and stuffed animals. Soap, telephones, and alarm clocks are presented alongside overtly political remainders such as flags, badges, and old IDs from mass organizations such as the Free German Youth. The famous East German plastic eggcup is ubiquitous, and nearly all museums contain a mock Konsum grocery store, often packed fuller than it ever was in reality.32 The collections are presented as a thematic assemblage interspersed with dioramas. Rooms or walls are devoted to species of objects (clocks, toys, typewriters, etc.) or events (school, home, vacation), more or less ordered, sometimes labeled, more often not, sometimes protected behind glass, sometimes explicitly available to be picked up and held. Dioramas range from kitsch to serious re-creations, such as in Apolda where mannequins complete the frozen image of a meticulous schoolroom or a dentist’s office. In contrast to the image of the GDR as gray, the exhibits are colorful and homey, as with the 1960s diorama in Wittenberg, complete down to the details of a chocolate bar and cookies on the table, a Stempke vacuum cleaner, a homemade antenna for receiving Western TV, and Igilit shades on the lamps illuminating books in the modular shelving units. Nearly all museums place emphasis on quantity, the rooms stacked with radios, watches, strollers or overstocked Konsum grocery stores conveying a sense of scale and fullness in distinction to the GDR’s image as a small state defined by scarcity (figures 2.4 and 2.5). While some displays emphasize iconic objects from the fifties and sixties such as kidneyshaped tables or hulking radio sets, the bulk of the objects are from the

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FIGURE 2.4  Televisions on display at the GDR History Museum in Perleberg. Some feature video loops of GDR-era television. This display style, showing numerous items of the same type, is repeated throughout most amateur GDR museums, with radios, cameras, watches, and other objects. 2010. Photo by author.

seventies and eighties. This reflects the increase in mass production that accompanied policy reforms, ultimately unsuccessful, to better address the consumer needs of its citizens.33 And, like the commercially successful DDR Museum in Berlin, with its motto “history to touch,” most private museums also emphasize experience and interactivity. These range from the ability to pick up and touch the exhibits, to lectures and discussions, to organized parties and events, such as Tutow’s six-and-a-halfhour packaged tour, which includes a full GDR-style meal, cabaret, and quiz show about everyday life and a winning prize “bestowed by Comrade Krause.”34 The museums are a qualified success. Some are haphazard collections in cramped spaces, others are multistory mainstays of their local tourist

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FIGURE 2.5  Grocery store with full shelves. Well-stocked Konsum grocery store display in the GDR History Museum in Perleberg. Nearly all museums contain a version of the grocery store, usually showing a fuller array of items than ever found in a typical GDR store. 2010. Photo by author.

economy. Over 120,000 visitors to date have sought out the re-created dentist’s office, schoolroom, and kitchen in Apolda, and over 50,000 visitors per year trek to the Time Travel (Zeitreise) Museum in Radebeul near Dresden. The Berlin DDR Museum tops them all, with over 500,000 visitors per year.35 All the museums claim that showing life “as it really was” is their main task, educating people too young to remember the GDR and providing an identity-affirming experience for the older generation. Judging by casual conversations and the many entries in guest books—“the museum awakens memories of our childhood” is a typical example—the target audiences are overwhelmingly appreciative of the trip down memory lane.

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THE POLITICS AND ANTIPOLITICS OF MEMORY In 2005, as mentioned at the start of the chapter, the Sabrow Commission of experts had urged a more concerted German effort in taking the socialist everyday more seriously, yet these museums were hardly what they had in mind. Quite the opposite: the commission’s recommendation was in part provoked by such “uncritical collections” of GDR everyday life, which seemed to dangerously trivialize the dictatorship.36 Sabrow has been the most publically visible champion of including the everyday in historical consciousness, but he is leery of amateur attempts. Speaking at a 2008 colloquium on the second anniversary of the DDR Museum in Berlin, he spoke frankly to his hosts, presenting a critique widely shared among professional historians and curators. While the DDR Museum in Berlin is in some ways a special case by dint of its commercial orientation, Western founder, and expert staff, the core of Sabrow’s critique covers nearly all the rougher amateur museums.37 Most crucially, he pointed out, the objects in the museum are not being properly treated, from their intake, cataloging, and storage through to their display. He was especially concerned with their availability to be handled by the viewers. Further, the exhibits lack critical distance and are too affirmative of life in the GDR. This problematic affirmation, he claims, is only intensified by the museum’s explicit focus on experience and feeling, which works to inhibit reflection, with the effect that the everyday becomes separated from dictatorship. Accordingly, by encouraging a good feeling (das Wohlfühlen), the museum effectively crosses the line into entertainment. All of this, argues Sabrow, creates a high risk for trivialization (Verharmlosung) of the GDR past with implications for subtly undermining the legitimacy of democracy in a united Germany. The museum’s “aura,” Sabrow concludes, is wrong, and needs to change to avoid being a decontextualized “amusement park of everydayness” (Jahrmarkt der Alltäglichkeiten).38 Sabrow’s critique echoes a more general one of museums of everyday culture, as epitomized by Gottfried Korff when he argues that, while the

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everyday, heritage, and popular culture made sense for museums in years past, today these are “likely a false strategy because they encourage not only the devaluation of everyday culture but of museum-work itself. . . . [Today] we require not only the turn towards small worlds but—increasingly—the recollection of grand structures, questions, and legacies.”39 The mundane subjective experiences of everyday life with its small pleasures seemed to pull against the overarching narrative of the GDR as an unjust, totalitarian system. Perhaps even more to the point, everyday objects operate like kitsch, with which they often overlap. Like kitsch, the everyday is ultimately held in suspicion of triggering emotional manipulation— especially in the hands of nonspecialists—and thereby clouding judgment. The fear is that substituting the unreliable subjectivity of memory against historical evidence at best risks trivialization of dictatorship, and at worst apology. The phrase I heard often from historians during my research— sometimes jokingly, sometimes in earnest—was the bon mot “the eyewitness is the historian’s enemy.”40 In light of critiques such as Korff ’s and Sabrow’s, the amateur museums appear to have a generally poor attitude toward history (what Kroff would call a “banal lust for relicts” (banaler Reliktbegier) at the expense of the “grand structures”), weak claims to be a “museum,” and border on apologia for dictatorship. Such a museum, Sabrow implies in his remarks, risks robbing a visitor of the “right to critical historical self-determination” by overwhelming the viewer or mirroring personal memories rather than providing the multiple perspectives of a freethinking society. At stake, then, in the seemingly innocent stacks of plastic eggcups, Mitropa menus, furniture units, cameras, and children’s toys is the ability of the name museum to retain, as Susan Crane once put it, its “trustworthiness . . . as a memory institution” and with it the ability of a democratic society to maintain its professional and critical standards.41 Confronted with such criticism, the directors and staff of the private museums I spoke with tend to shake their heads wearily. Nearly all these museums make a point, publicly and privately, of denying any intention to glorify the past. Rather, the message is that they seek to dignify

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people’s lived experience. In general, the term Ostalgie is avoided to describe the museums or used self-consciously, sparingly, and with qualifications. “Dear visitors,” asks an open letter at the GDR Museum in Tutow “is it Ostalgie to long for the scents of childhood?”42 The defensive claim is that it is not nostalgic to objectively show life “as it really was.” And “real” here means for the most part doing what Sabrow would condemn as divorcing the everyday from dictatorship: the Radebeul Zeitreise (Time Travel) Museum’s concept paper says upfront that it is concerned with “real life” and “not with the overly common portrayal of the GDR and its mechanism of repression.” The museum’s director insisted in an interview with me that “MfS [i.e., the Stasi] and persecution are not important in the sphere of the everyday.”43 Thus this museum and others locate their value as a supplement or corrective to what some directors expressed bitterly as a Western, self-serving, state-supported “demonization” of East Germany. The museums thus seek to actively distinguish themselves from, for example, the Leipzig Forum for Contemporary History, a federally funded museum (directed initially by a former East German dissident) and its mission, in its own words, to “commemorate the history of political repression, opposition, as well as resistance” while showcasing “the peaceful revolution against the background of the division of Germany and everyday life in the communist dictatorship.”44 They also distinguish themselves from other museums with a focus on remembering the division and repression that have emerged through a kind of parallel process, often similarly created on the initiative of private individuals or groups, such as the grassroots civil rights group Anti-Stalinist Action BerlinNormannenstrasse (ASTAK) formed in 1990 to preserve the headquarters and files of the Ministry for State Security (the Stasi Museum). Similar to the amateur museums of everyday life, groups such as these often come into conflict with the federal government concerning how to preserve and commemorate repression under the GDR.45 The private directors of everyday-life museums (not all of which are from the East)

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do not deny the legitimacy of commemorating repression and resistance, and often include the theme in some way in their displays, but argue adamantly that a perceived excessive focus on these areas effectively silences the lived experience of millions of GDR citizens and that their museums provide a needed alternative narrative. Their museums, they claim, correct a perceived hegemonic Western narrative that devalues East German lives by consigning them to a past where life was either a lie or a crime. This is highly political territory, but rather than embrace politics the museums proffer a kind of antipolitics in which the museums present themselves as a corrective to an overly politicized environment. Thus, before the visitor even arrives, the objects are framed as nonpolitical and implicitly more trustworthy than exhibits in state-funded museums. We want “to remember, not to provoke” is the preemptive motto of the museum in Langenweddingen. The Tutow museum’s invocation (quoted earlier) about the unreproachable longing for the scent of childhood, as well as other frequent displays or mentions of childhood in the museums, allows a certain longing for childhood to take on the role, as Olga Shevchenko and Maya Nadkarni argue, of a primary trope through which memory is made apolitical and therefore more “objective.”46 Such apolitical spaces would be familiar to former GDR citizens, disposed from the socialist era to be skeptical of overtly political or state venues, such as state-funded museums or government-funded political education exhibits. The result is a mixture of defensiveness and dilettantish pride, as in this notice from the Thale museum to its visitors: “We have endeavored, as far as possible, to create neutral viewing possibilities. But EVERYTHING lies in the eye of the beholder! . . . We are not professional curators and therefore offer no guarantee of completeness or accuracy for the texts and graphics [that accompany the exhibits].” With our exhibits, explains the Apolda museum, “we want to illustrate the GDR everyday, nothing more and nothing less.”47

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MEMORY VALUE AND THE TACTICS OF AUTHENTICITY Of course this kind of rhetoric and museal approach is exactly what drives the professional historians and curators mad. I encountered many mutual recriminations: Historians and curators are critical of the museums’ unabashedly uncritical approach to the past, which, they fear, contains an inherent risk of trivialization (Verharmlosung) regardless of individual intentions. Amateur museum directors and supporters see an equivalent false consciousness at work in which their critics fail to notice their own entanglement with conservative political narratives and how this prevents a dignified recognition of “lived experience.” At times the two sides grudgingly recognize the validity of each other’s perspective. At others, the discourse approaches what Jan Werner Müller, writing about similar debates within the history profession, once characterized as “a profoundly unhelpful, provincial and theoretically impoverished polarization of positions.”48 More illuminating is a closer look at how the amateur museums use everyday material culture to make an implicit argument for legitimately representing the past. The proliferation of amateur museums of everyday life under socialism and their sustained audience interest indicates a level of success in the ecology of Germany’s memory and museum landscape, regardless of one’s opinion of this phenomenon. It is too easy, however, to assume that these spaces somehow appeared naturally or were an effortless undertaking. Rather, the museums needed to convince their target audiences (former GDR citizens, their children, and curious visitors from the West and abroad) that the objects are, so to speak, bearers of objectivity and therefore legitimate vehicles for encountering the past. In other words, they had to redeem objects at first widely disparaged as unworthy of being remembered or otherwise deemed banal. These objects had to acquire what we can call, following Nikolai Vukov, a memory value as distinct from a historical or commercial value.49 How did they do this? The antipathy between the amateurs and professionals tends to fall into the standard struggle between memory and forgetting where memory

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is a normative battleground. Vukov, however, introduces the notion of a struggle between memory and representation as different than that between memory and forgetting. Rather than struggling over the interpretation of already recognized history, here it is the concept of the “unmemorable” that forms the “fighting ground” between memory and representation. The unmemorable refers at one level to the everyday— hence banal—aspects of life, but the term signals conflicts over the “worthiness” of remembering. Different from the repression of memory due to trauma, the unmemorable is a category of worth.50 In trying to represent what the GDR was “really” like, amateur museums thus face a common representational challenge: How is the unmemorable made memorable, i.e., how is memory given or deprived of value? How is value (worth) created through the representation of the past, especially when that past concerns the everyday? One significant way in which the museums achieve this is through the tactics of authenticity. Professional museums elevate authenticity to a central role in representation through practices of authentication (e.g. certifying, cataloging, explanations, etc.). In contrast, the private museums assert authenticity not through provenance or expert interpretation but through a reembedding of the objects in an informal and avowedly apolitical context. In the amateur museums, authenticity becomes the stock in trade for presenting life “as it really was,” the primary strategy for representing the unmemorable. The aura of authenticity, more than any other element, gives the museums their edge and draws visitors. Authenticity operates as a form of trust that puts people at ease with objects, from the reassuringly amateurish nature of the more homespun exhibits to the sleekly designed DDR Museum in Berlin, where, as the research director put it to me, “we produce authenticity.”51 One of the directors of a provincial museum explained that people donate to his exhibit because they trust him personally, and they come to the museum because they can trust the authenticity of the objects and the nonjudgmental context of their display.52 Because the objects bear the legacy of ideology along with their aura of familiarity, they gain their viewers’ trust initially by being embedded in

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a narrative that claims to remove the objects from the realm of politics. Because the everydayness of the objects becomes the signifier of authenticity, the museums have a compelling interest in decoupling the objects from ideology—the very opposite of what Sabrow and most critics deem responsible. Political neutrality may well be, as Sabrow argues, impossible, yet it is precisely what many of the museums strive for, as we have seen. The museums’ message is that because other museums (i.e., state-supported ones) are “political” by dint of their very connection to the state, they are therefore not “authentic.” Authenticity is not expressed through fidelity to objects (as in a conventional museum) but through presenting the space as apolitical or, more precisely, antipolitical. While political objects as such are not entirely absent in displays, they are often deployed as background context: at times atmospheric, as with slogan banners, songs, and newspaper headlines, other times as a counterpoint to the antipolitical niche society of everyday life, as with images of mass demonstrations, or as extensions of politics into everyday life, as with displays of objects from the Pioneers or Free German Youth movements, pins, or awards. This antipolitical context allows the objects themselves to play a special role in indexing authenticity, which speaks above allthrough the objects. Perhaps more precisely, the objects are presented as speaking for themselves—the objects as bearers of objectivity. They speak for themselves, ironically, by speaking for others: for other persons from a bygone era but also for other objects. Their authenticity is confirmed not by expert authentication, but by viewers’ familiarity and by a form of common sense that knows that there is a surfeit of objects so it seems obvious that any given object is representative of a whole class of objects “out there.” This feels reassuring—there is safety in numbers. Visitors are quickly struck by the large scale of the museums’ exhibits, which, the directors will eagerly tell you, represent only a fraction of the objects that they have stored away in garages, barns, basements, and warehouses. The numbers are an important part of the strategy of authenticity, as when the museum in Apolda proudly advertises over twelve hundred objects, as if to convey both the scale of the lost past and the comprehensiveness, and hence authenticity, of the collection.53

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The sheer plenitude of excess products and ephemera from the GDR thus allows the objects to accrue the status of original, even when—or precisely because—there is no systematic means of verifying their provenance. This is perhaps fitting for the material culture of a society where collectivization achieved efficiency in mass production, where individual taste was subordinated to social norms, and the material world was designed to align the individual with the mass. An object is thus on display not because it is unique, but because it indexes all other objects of its type. The often “unprofessional” style of display—walls of televisions or rows of sewing machines, what might be called an aesthetics of the pile—is important here because it downplays the originality of the object and inserts it into a concentrated version of the GDR everyday, when people would encounter these objects in each other’s homes or offices (figure 2.6). In this way the objects appear generic and disconnected from their actual owners or personal stories without losing a sense of authenticity.

FIGURE 2.6  Stack of stereo units. Display of stereos and audio equipment at the Zeitreise Museum, Radebeul. In a different room the visitor can listen to selected units. 2009. Photo by author.

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Objects on display are almost never linked to a particular narrative, rather, the point of displaying the object is less to relate someone else’s personal story than to trigger memories of the viewer’s personal story or to trigger their asking of others (such as children asking parents). This makes the museums primarily author centered rather than “witness centered,” with no reliance on filmed interviews or documentaries and only occasional commentary from staff members who are GDR contemporaries when available. Wandering among the cornucopia of authentic objects, visitors are left to generate their own narratives, a type of self-narration that accompanies self-curation. This works, in different ways, for both Westerners and Easterners. The common lack of specific labeling lends many objects an auratic air that makes them differently legible for Eastern and Western viewers. Drawing on different experiences, visitors from East and West can both exclaim, “My mother had that!” or “I saw that on visits to my relatives.” These parallel narratives are inadvertently produced by the film-still-like quality of the many dioramic presentations that highlight the objects almost as if they were archaic advertisements for a shared postwar modernity. And at times this postwar modernity seems more like a common inheritance than a distant division, as in this entry from the Langenweddingen museum’s guest book (in original syntax): Over the holiday weekend for the Day of German Unity [October 3], we set out to Langenweddingen full of curiosity. Thanks to information from the local papers we learned of your museum. Despite the beautiful weather we went inside + don’t regret it! Our curiosity was fully sated. There was so much to reminisce about in amazement + giggles, unbelievable head-shaking and recognition, muttering “we had that too” + constant exclamations like, e.g. “what a colorless packaging!” or “so much plastic!” Discovering all these things again anew was good + somehow funny too. Looking back with smiles or amazement from the color-intensive world of today was all the more exhilarating. We—a woman from Magdeburg [East] + a man from Hannover [West], who met each other thanks to the unification [die Wende]!

Collecting Communism Z 7 1 + discovered things that, thanks to the Zeitgeist of the times, the man from Hannover also knew (e.g. toys)—despite the Wall! . . . Thus was this Day of German Unity in a double sense our day of unity, + we could (re)live history together.54

INTIMACY AND AUTHENTICITY The museums’ key to producing authenticity, importantly, lies in their elevation of intimacy as part of the visitor experience. Intimacy lies in the very things professional historians and curators criticize—the open display of objects as if they were in someone’s house rather than a museum, the ability or explicit invitation to touch the objects, tours by “real” former East Germans who are not professional museum workers. Ironically, the very anonymity of the objects enhances an experience of intimacy, which emanates from the seemingly carefree approach to the objects themselves combined with a focus on the more feminine-coded spaces of home, interior, school, childhood, food, and camaraderie rather than the masculinecoded spaces of the shop floor, factory, and street.55 This lends the museums a strongly gendered dimension: Visitors encounter underwear drying on a clothesline, plates piled pell-mell in a kitchen, toys left in mid-play.56 The presence of intimate objects such as bathroom products and condoms establish an indirect connection between the object and the viewer’s body. Exhibits are supplemented by dioramas and tableaus of everyday life. Sometimes these appear as frozen tableaus behind a thin cord asking visitors to stay back. Others, such as the lovingly re-created full-scale apartments spanning four decades in Lutherstadt Wittenberg’s “House of History” invite you to sit on the couch and watch TV, grab a book from the bookcase, and all but take a beer from the refrigerator. At the Berlin DDR Museum, wardrobes can be opened, kitchen utensils and bath items handled, magazines leafed through, couches sat on, telephones talked on, and so on. Visitors can try on clothes, literally inhabiting the Other, who, perhaps by design, looks a lot like a slightly retro self (figures 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9).

FIGURE 2.7  Intimate garments on a drying rack. Laundry in a washroom diorama,

GDR History Museum in Perleberg. 2010. Photo by author.

FIGURE 2.8  Trying on clothes. Visitors trying on GDR-era clothes at the DDR Museum Berlin. This is part of the museum’s signature “history to touch” interactive concept. 2009. Photo by author.

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FIGURE 2.9  Living room diorama with woman mannequin ironing. Domesticity

appears often in GDR museums where the everyday is depicted as seemingly apolitical. DDR Museum Burg (Spreewald). 2013. Photo by author.

Intimacy and authenticity are enhanced by tactility and its haptic extensions. The DDR Museum in Berlin, with its motto “History to Touch: See, Feel, Experience,” is perhaps the best example of this. It describes itself as a museum to be-greifen, a pun in German, where the added hyphen gives the word the double meaning to both comprehend and to grasp, or reach, for something. As the press spokesperson for the museum put it upon the opening of the expanded exhibit in 2010, “Visitors should just go right ahead and touch everything, any exhibit that comes between their fingers, actively and curiously. As a Berliner I would say ‘don’t be shy! Grab those hamburgers’ [ran an die Buletten] or in this case ‘grab those exhibits’ ”!57 Or as the official English promotional material states, “Everything waits to be touched and experienced: Open the drawers and closets, rummage through them and discover!”58 Touch blurs the border of self and other. Invoking tactility in the museum is, consciously or not, another way of generating trust and thereby shoring up the

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experience of intimacy and authenticity that makes it possible to represent the unmemorable. Tactility is not always considered a positive quality: Marshall McLuhan, in his analysis of tactility and technology in the media, considered it to have a numbing effect.59 Following Walter Benjamin’s use of the term in connection to the optical unconscious, tactility is thought of as allowing for the experience of the new in the early stages of encounter with a medium.60 For McLuhan this meant, especially with the rise of television, the dominance of a new desensitizing, anesthetic effect caused by exposure to media with its “daily sessions of synaesthesia . . . that wash about the great visual structure of Abstract Individual Man.”61 But what we see in the Berlin DDR Museum is a different employment of the synesthetic, where one modality of experience, for example, touch, calls for another, for example, sound or smell. Unlike the analyses of Benjamin or McLuhan, we find less the optical unconscious being prepped for a new medium than a deployment of multisensory experiences in the service of creating memory value. Particularly in the Berlin DDR Museum, but increasingly in the smaller, less commercial everyday museums, such multisensory experiences are a central feature of the experience of the “real” GDR. The DDR Museum in Berlin claims to be “one of the most interactive museums in the world,” a distinction that helped it be twice nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award.62 This is in part, as the research director explained to me, “a response to the virtualization of the world” but also, he noted, because they are attempting to create an anchor for a “rudderless sense of memory of the GDR that combines color, taste, history as fantasy and history as personal trauma.”63

POSTSOCIALIST SYNESTHESIA Authenticity thus takes a turn as it begins to augment the original object with phantasmagoric sensory experience. Sound, film, and interactive

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media become integral parts of this synesthesia. Unlike more conventional eyewitness interviews or documentaries looking back at the GDR, actual footage is often used to create a sense of authenticity by putting the visitor in the position, respectively, of voyeur, spectator, and addressee. In the position of voyeur, visitors to the Berlin museum can watch loops of demonstrations or street scenes observed through the lens of footage from Stasi security cameras (figure 2.10). As spectator, visitors in many of the museums can watch snippets of GDR television, such as a loop of news on Aktuelle Kamera, or, as in the Berlin museum, see short movies in a small cinema re-created to showcase both GDR-era technology and period films, with a huge functioning projector taken from the State Council, as large as a boiler, placed as an objet d’art behind the seats.

FIGURE 2.10  Surveillance footage from the GDR era. Secretly filmed surveillance

of public streets by the Ministry for State Security, on view at the DDR Museum Berlin. 2009. Photo by author.

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A soundtrack of GDR songs accompanies visitors as they move through most all of the museums. The visitor browses the rows of radios or stacks of cleaning supplies to the strains of the Party Song (Das Lied der Partei, also known as The Party Is Always Right), the former GDR national anthem (now available in techno remix), or the peppy Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ) October Club song Which Side Are You On (Sag mir wo Du stehst). The uniformity of these songs across museums is striking. The songs work simultaneously as branding and atmospherics, the marches and rhythms providing a lively accompaniment to the primary colors of GDR plastics and FDJ banners, while the national anthem echoes suitably like a dirge. But sound is deployed not only as a soundtrack but as an exhibit itself, via headphones, that, as in Berlin, allow the visitor to listen to preselected clips of GDR rock music or listen privately to television shows on small screens set in a wall made to look like the facade of a typical prefabricated East German building (Plattenbau). In Radebeul a room full of stereo systems plays music with a slightly different purpose, not to highlight the music but, as the director emphasized to me, to showcase the high quality of GDR sound technology. It is at the Berlin museum, however, that sound is fully employed in a synesthetic sense with the expressed purpose of allowing the viewer to “experience” the Other in a double sense—the Other in the form of the now disappeared East German average citizen and, within that imaginary space, the Stasi or party official. The role-playing between “average citizen” and “party or state security official” almost feels like theme park adaptations of the films Good-bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others, a sense confirmed by the museum’s research director that the museum serves as an “intellectual playground” that transmits history as “information, fun, and color.”64 Accordingly, the visitor is encouraged first to pick up the receiver of a telephone in the “authentic prefabricated apartment” for an average person’s experience and then to pick up the phone on a high party official’s desk, where the voice of a subordinate makes lame excuses. Playing on this role between subject and object, the re-created prefabricated apartment, where visitors can sit on the couch and watch TV, is

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bugged. In a different wing of the museum, other visitors can squeeze into the narrow “Stasi corner,” don headphones at a desk covered with listening equipment, binders, and a portrait of Erich Honecker, and “spy” on fellow visitors down the hall in the “apartment” display. Interactivity connects touch, sound, and sight to give visitors a kind of authenticity in the form of authority born of experience. Visitors can sit inside authentic Trabi (average citizen) or Volvo (high official) cars, start the ignition, and “drive” them virtually through the city laid out on a screen in front of the car. Video games invite the visitor to match definitions, to use touch screens to dress virtual figures with period clothes, and to simulate making decisions to keep a state-owned enterprise afloat. A digital board game beckons children to slam down bureaucratic stamps that call forth information on the game board. Most interactive of all, however, is a soundproof, glass-walled interrogation room, where the visitor literally adopts the physical position of a detainee sitting across from an interrogator, portrayed here as a life-size black wooden cutout. The interrogator’s questions are heard clearly in the room, but when the visitor puts her elbows on the table and hands over her ears the detainee’s answers are transmitted through a special “bone sound technology” (Knochenschalltechnologie), and, as the museum’s own exhibition description puts it, “The interrogation comes to life!” (figure 2.11) This mimetic act turns the visitor into the prosthesis of the unnamed, but voiced, victim. Intimacy is established at a new level here, one where authenticity is no longer about a safe zone for trust but a leaving of the self to enter a zone of indeterminate authority. As Sara Jones points out in her analysis of an interactive interrogation exhibit at a Stasi prison, the effect of intimacy is produced by putting the visitor in the position of both expert and witness.65 These interactive exhibits about the Stasi complicate the claim made earlier by one director that the Stasi had no place in the everyday, for the Stasi appears as an inconsistent presence in the museums, reflecting its own ambiguity as a steady, if spectral, part of everyday life in the GDR.66 The strategies of authenticity address different audiences both spatially (East and West) and temporally (across generations). Yet they share

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FIGURE 2.11  “Interrogation Room” at the DDR Museum Berlin. Visitors can simulate being interrogated while others watch through the window. The “interrogator” is a shadowy cutout figure. The museum states that, through a specially designed sound system for simulating questions and answers, “the interrogation comes to life!” Berlin 2010. Photo by author.

the goal of allowing the amateur museums to represent the unmemorable objects of the era by creating a “semiotic loop” of images, texts, and objects that, in Beverly James’s phrase, “draws the viewer into an imagined past.”67 This, she points out, makes museums spaces for forms of “semantic collaboration” between objects and viewers.68 In the amateur museums this semiotic loop elevates sound, touch, and even smell and taste in a kind of “premodern” form of museum where sight is less privileged, harking back to a time before the modern privileging, and subsequent reduction, of apprehension to the visual. In this context it is perhaps not coincidental that the Berlin museum spokesperson used the comparison of eating

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hamburgers to touching the exhibits, for both are about in-corporation. Fittingly, the museum exit takes you directly to a GDR-themed restaurant that serves “authentic” food, albeit adjusted to contemporary high quality. The museum leaves a taste.

WORKING THROUGH “Museums don’t have to be boring,” penned one visitor in the Berlin DDR Museum’s guestbook, “here history can be experienced.” Taking this, perhaps, to its logical extreme, a young guest named Zoe writes in the rural Burg museum’s book: “I find it [the museum] very pretty, and I myself would like to live in the GDR!” Such comments, combined with the theme park approach of the Berlin museum and the poorly lit rooms of most other museums, filled with Mitropa menus, synthetic dresses, oversized radios, and prefabricated furniture, seem to exemplify the uncritical approach to the past feared by the private museums’ many critics. But, as a social phenomenon, the museums can be seen to be helping to overcome rather than reinforce the worn but persistent binary of totalitarianism and everyday life as antagonistic frameworks for understanding the socialist past. Looked at as a group, these museums were grassroots spaces during the first decades following reunification where the everyday could be encountered. In this sense, they are arguably part of the process of working through the past (Aufarbeitung). Reducible neither to mere reckless trivialization nor insensitive appropriation, the museums provide a valuable venue for addressing, in the first instance, the spheres of consumption and civil society through their focus on material culture of the everyday. This might seem contradictory because the GDR rejected the market, and civil society was routinely repressed. Yet, as Andreas Ludwig argues, we can see through everyday material culture how the rise of “real existing socialism” under Honecker helped shift practices from postwar sacrifice for socialist victory in the fifties and sixties to the idea of a “socialist

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lifestyle” (sozialistischen Lebensweise) in the seventies and eighties.69 This, in turn, introduced practices that, arguably, prepared GDR society to be more, not less, receptive to the market society post-1989. Similarly, while “resistance” is at first glance missing from the private museums, visitors regularly encounter traces of what in East Germany was called Eigensinn (willfulness, stubbornness) in letters of complaint or creative responses to scarcity or even in subtle reappropriations of popular culture out from under its politicization from above.70 What today we would call alternative lifestyles appears in city garden and camping cultures, reproductions of teenage rooms decorated with rock posters and Coke bottles, displays of homemade antennas, jeans, insignia from environmental movements, and even, in the Perleberg museum, an entire section devoted to the everyday of the evangelical church and the peace movement.71 The official cultural memory of the GDR itself, with its lugubrious memorials and official commemorations, appears often in anachronistic or ironic form on the margins of the vernacular memory of everyday objects. The point is not that private museums are in any way substitutes for the more professional treatment of resistance found, for example, in the Leipzig Forum for Contemporary History, but that they can—even unintentionally—contribute to a subtler understanding of the everyday as a space capable of transformation and adaptation, rather than a static representation of “how it really was.” They create room, despite the claim made by the Zeitreise Museum that “real life” can be treated separately from repression, for highlighting precisely the “everyday under dictatorship” and its attendant tensions. This undertone, present to greater or lesser extent in all the museums, comes to the surface in often sudden or unexpected ways. For example, like the other museums, the one in Perleberg shows images from popular television shows to humorous effect, such as old talk shows, political congresses, Sandmann cartoons, or dated anchormen on old news broadcasts. Yet, subtly but suddenly, the visitor is placed less in

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the role of ironic viewer, but instead in the role of addressee, when a looped segment from the propaganda show “The Black Channel” (Der schwarze Kanal ) encourages the viewer to hate the enemy in the West (which, of course, has now absorbed the East, thus asking the Eastern viewer to hate themselves). In this short film, the infamous GDR propagandist KarlEduard von Schnitzler presents hatred of the West as a form of love for Germany. Too disturbing to be merely ironic, the uncomfortable cinematic confrontation with this crass exhortation to hate in the name of love serves almost as a prelude to a subsequent exhibit in the same museum. Upstairs, past the “library” of GDR books and at a crossroads leading to the kitchen diorama on the left and sewing machines and a children’s room diorama on the right, the viewer catches herself in a full-length mirror, upon which is written, “What did YOU do and who were YOU in this dictatorship?” (figure 2.12).72 This mirror, like the Black Channel segment, dislodges viewers from the realm of reminiscence and presents them with silent questions about their own relation to dictatorship. All around the mirror are real local spy paraphernalia (e.g., a machine to open letters) and poster-size blow-ups of documents from the local office of the Ministry for State Security in Perleberg and the surrounding region. A long list of street names is paired with the cover names of the agents assigned to watch them: Bürger Street was assigned to “Herring”; Bahn Street had four agents assigned—“Baker, Letter, Rose, and Wulff.” A sign on a working TV monitor is reassuring: “This terminal is no longer connected to the Stasi office.” While Western visitors and the younger generation of Easterners might view such visual dissonances with ironic distance or feelings of immunity, the true target audience in Perleberg falls primarily into the history as personal trauma category. The political content in some of the Perleberg displays, especially the mirror’s literal call to self reflection and the notion of history as personal trauma, thus troubles the aforementioned distinction, following Vukov, between the unmemorable as an apolitical category of worth and memory as the repression of politically generated

FIGURE 2.12  Confronting the viewer with their own past. Mirror in the Perleberg

GDR Museum asking the viewer “What were you, and what did you do in this dictatorship?” Surrounding the mirror are lists of cover names for local state security informants (not shown). 2010. Photo by author.

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trauma. The Perleberg Museum purposely seeks to draw the connections between the two while remaining resolutely antipolitical. Yet its antipolitics is, in a certain sense, deeply political, as it is concerned primarily with the question of personal moral conduct in the context of civil society, both in the past and present. In this way the Perleberg Museum’s otherwise banal presentation of everyday objects (paradigmatic in its rooms bursting with radios, typewriters, telephones, etc.) becomes a space for directly confronting the varied repressed traumas that accompanies the lived experience of the GDR. The director, a former pastor, explained his understanding of his role as museum director “as a Christian, not as a historian.”73 By this he means seeing his role as creating a therapeutic safe space where visitors can safely confront their own implication in the past. The “visa” that visitors receive as their entrance ticket invites them into a liminal space. The older visitors, the director told me, “at first express joy and recognition and then remember what life was like.” As they get deeper into the museum, they feel allowed to feel, he said, recounting a woman who recently stayed behind alone crying in one of the many rooms, not wanting her husband to see her tears. For “mixed couples,” as he called them, an Easterner will bring his or her Western spouse, with the preface that “my partner doesn’t believe what I lived through” and eager to see what it was “really” like.

“WORKING THROUGH” FROM THE BOTTOM TO THE TOP The amateur museums surely offer many opportunities for criticism from their professionalism to their politics, yet each museum, in its own way, paints a more complicated picture of the practice of “working through” the past. In some, especially more rural or small-town museums where the audience is significantly local, the emphasis is on activating one’s own history, a type of self-curation that is also a curation of the self. For younger visitors and tourists from western Germany or abroad, the

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museums emphasize more empathetic experiences to put the visitor in the position of the other, sometimes literally as in the interrogation exhibit in Berlin. Despite their theme park or ramshackle feel, the focus on the everyday gives these museums a certain auratic power that is too easily overlooked. As museums dealing with a contentious past through the lens of the everyday, they simultaneously embed themselves in the local landscape as a form of heritage museum while eliciting reactions from the national memory landscape. Within united Germany, the amateur museums are essentially regional museums that fit both into the historical phenomenon of the Heimatsmuseum (heritage museum) that exploded across the German landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the more recent “museum boom” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first.74 The classic German heritage museum uses the spiritual word for “home,” Heimat, rather than the somewhat untranslatable English concept heritage, and is characterized by love of country, a deep affection for objects, and a passion for collecting. Known in French as la musée de la petite Patrié (the museum of the small fatherland), its original social impetus lay in resistance to the changes wrought by industrialization, resulting in an especially strong anti-urban and pro-agricultural flavor. In this sense, as historians point out, heritage museums were paradoxically both bourgeois and antibourgeois, undermining the idea of the museum as a sacred elite vessel in service of the modernizing state, but also seeking to inculcate “authentic” values in the people (Volk) through the apotheosis of tradition.75 The amateur museums share the classic function of heritage museums in all major respects that Korff identifies: a symbolic affective relation to space in which the region appears as an “emotionally laden protective space,” becoming a subnational level of compensation for the negative impact of powerful and distant elites; the creation of a feeling of intimacy that calms the temporal dizziness of modern change; and achieving all this through a sensual, tactile mode of presentation where material objects are used to counteract the disappearance of the past and become the basis for communication across generations.76

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At the same time, the amateur museums have played a part in shifting the German everyday discourse at the national level where the “managers of public history” are responding to the belated call to include the everyday.77 This can be seen in changes within the most prominent state-supported institutions: the German Historical Museum in Berlin (Deutsches Historisches Museum, DHM) and the House of History Foundation for the Federal Republic of Germany (Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, HdG), which operates museums in Bonn, Leipzig, and Berlin. Generously funded with taxpayer money, they form an essential part of the memory landscape through their high numbers of visitors (over a million per year for the House of History museums) and their extensive outreach to school, university, and military populations. While accused by some of the amateur museums for perpetuating an oversimplified Western perspective that showcases East Germany’s indigenous revolution against a background of inexorable decline, the statesupported museums see themselves as helping forge a needed postwar narrative of Germany’s division and unification.78 They follow, in effect, Korff ’s aforementioned call for grand structures instead of small worlds. Highly professional, striving for accuracy in their historical facts and authenticity in their objects, the stories they tell are necessarily smoothed into a larger narrative of German history. As national museums with primary funding from the federal government, this narrative reflects both the pressures of a broad educational mission and, as amateur museums are quick to point out, the legacy of their founding under Helmut Kohl’s conservative government in the 1980s.79 These state-supported major history museums were, from the beginning, among the largest collectors of everyday life. Yet, despite acquiring some high-quality artifacts relating to GDR everyday culture, these museums had neither the mission nor the inclination to initially give the everyday more than a passing notice in their permanent exhibitions. The GDR is a theme on the margins of the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum, DHM), where some of its curatorial staff noted in private conversation the “conservative” and “inflexible” constraints

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of its federal mandate and board of directors regarding the representation of GDR everyday life. Special DHM exhibits devoted to the everyday garnered more favorable responses from the public, even if one curator told me that “older” Easterners complained that they didn’t see themselves in one of the major exhibits despite the best efforts of the team to use objects to tell life stories.80 The other major history museum, the House of History in Bonn, was initially criticized for its minimal, even dismissive portrayal of the GDR, leading it to revise its permanent exhibit. It initially left the everyday primarily to its eastern Leipzig location, opened in 1999, which took until 2007 to incorporate the everyday more significantly and consistently into its permanent exhibit. The Leipzig museum, known as the Contemporary History Forum, focuses on the “civil courage” of opposition and resistance in the GDR and embeds the objects in a clear narrative. This moral clarity serves as a source of empowerment, but can also appear to take critical aim at the smaller GDR museums, for example, through the self-proclaimed goal of the permanent exhibit to work “against all tendencies of trivilialization and justification of the SED dictatorship.”81 It was only in 2011 that the House of History began to address the everyday more directly through its opening of an exhibit on the German division in the former border departure hall known as the Palace of Tears (Tränenpalast) in Berlin, and in 2013 it opened a permanent exhibit explicitly devoted to the everyday in Berlin’s “Cultural Brewery” (Kulturbrauerei) in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district. As the first everyday museum to be directly federally funded, the House of History’s Prenzlauer Berg location sought to create an exhibit that would, as its chief curator, Jürgen Reiche, explained, go deeper into history of the everyday than the German Historical Museum by following individual stories in a thematic, rather than chronological, setting.82 The private Berlin DDR Museum clearly divides “everyday” from “state” in two separate sections of the museum, separated by a literal wall of mist. In contrast the House of History’s everyday museum literally puts the

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state in the middle along a “propaganda axis” that forms the heart of the exhibit divided between “living” and “working.” The main visual when you enter the museum on the ground floor is a long row of busts of Marx and Lenin, shrinking in descending order from large to small. Upstairs in the main part, the museum’s theme is the juxtaposition between the state and lived experience. This is achieved, in part, through a similar approach to interactivity, such as a rebuilt dacha (country house) where the visitor can take a seat on the terrace and leaf through magazines or a living room where one can sit on the couch, constantly reminded that, as Reiche put it, “the shadow of the dictatorship lies over everything.”83 Professional to a fault, the recreated GDR spaces are suggestive rather than fully replicated, mixing original items in a streamlined space that seeks to convey an authentic aura, such as in their version of the grocery store (figure 2.13). The overfull grocery stores one sees in most GDR everyday museums, one of the House of History curators explained, did not replicate the original feeling, not because stores in the GDR were empty but because the shelves were usually full of one or two products of the same kind. The museum’s challenge is to recreate the visual sense of monotony, what might be called the abundance of scarcity, and they searched until they found a man in Dessau who used to have a grocery store and still had older items stocked in his cellar that are now on display.84 The House of History’s Prenzlauer Berg Museum is inevitably and predictably compared to the DDR Museum in Berlin—“Who can do GDR better?” asked a headline in a magazine article about its opening.85 An even more contested subtext is the origin of the exhibit, which lies in the takeover by the House of History of the GDR-era Industrial Design Collection (Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung) in 2005. Despite this unique collection, Reiche explicitly did not want a design museum, but rather to emphasize the connection between politics and the everyday by, for example, putting a surfboard next to a sign that surfing near the border is forbidden. Thus while industrial traces are present, for example, in the

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FIGURE 2.13  Grocery store with meager products. Recreated “HO” grocery store

in the GDR Everyday Museum run by the House of History, Berlin. The curator sought to convey an authentic sense of monotony and scarcity. 2014. Photo by author.

medallion press machine that literally performed the work of material culture by minting thousands of propaganda medals and pins in its day, the design collection is relegated to a significantly subordinate role.86 The new focus on everyday life under socialism among state-supported museums came only after the smaller, privately funded museums we have explored in this chapter established themselves in the memory landscape. This chapter has argued that these small museums—regarded by state funding agencies as “not worthy of the name museum” (nicht museumsgerecht), as one director complained to me—play an important role in making the GDR everyday available for contemporary representation. From the short-lived but intense garbage phase of the early 1990s, to the proliferation of amateur museums across the former East by the turn of the century, to their echo in the incorporation of everyday themes in

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state-supported history museums in the third decade after unification, we traced how objects of everyday life under socialism carry forward the task of working through the past by both inviting and confounding attempts at historical objectification. The very controversy over the value of the museums and their objects points us to the function of the everyday as an endless chain of codes to be unlocked in an ongoing play of difference.87 The everyday in these museums thus constantly invites and eludes appropriation: those seeking to tell a coherent story want to appropriate it, only to find others deploying the everyday to elude their appropriation. This was true within the GDR itself, where the everyday served as a kind of striving for normalcy, whether defined through acceptance or resistance of the governing order.88 And it is at work in the private museums, which in their own way strive for normalcy amidst the demands of postunification transformation and adaptation. They claim to provide a portal for time travel to show “how it really was,” yet perhaps the effect is much more in the present. The museums are not only spaces for individual encounters with one’s past or tactile experiences with a vanished world but also a space for apprehending the shift in GDR society from postwar sacrifice to “lifestyle” to the postunification market society that it has become today. For the everyday is simultaneously, as the historian Harry Harootunian put it, “the social space of submerged dreams of the past— a spectral history—and a possibility for the future.”89 These museums, which have survived and even thrived decades after reunification, form such a social space in the contemporary memory landscape of united Germany.

3 UNBUILDING

T

he winter of 2009 brought a new emptiness to the center of Berlin when the Palace of the Republic, the building that housed the former East German parliament and cultural center, was “unbuilt” after eighteen years of twilight existence. In its place emerged a muddy expanse on its way to a parklike lawn. This lawn remained in place until construction began in 2012 on a facsimile of the Prussian royal “city castle,” the war-damaged original of which had been blown up in 1950 by the East German communist regime. In the interim Berlin acquired a new void in the center of a city famously defined architecturally by its absences, its rubble, its wounds, its wastelands and margins, and by repeated architectural attempts to fill, compensate, heal, reclaim, and rationalize those incorrigible spaces. Gazing into this void we see a peculiar palace dialectic framed by dual destructions and dueling palaces that imbricates all six German incarnations of the twentieth century.1 Shifting from the objects of everyday life, this chapter moves to the national stage of Berlin, looking into the political contentiousness of public space in the wake of modernist visions.2 The fate of the former palace becomes a particularly complex case of inheritance, one that exemplifies the “jagged” borders of memory Michael Rothberg invokes in his exploration of multidirectionality. “Memories are not owned by groups,” he writes, “nor are groups owned by memories. . . . What looks at first like my property often turns out to be a borrowing or

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adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant.”3 This is true temporally as well as spatially, and in chapter 3 I show how debates about architecture, urban space, and coming to terms with the past entwine the material terrain of the site with the symbolic terrain of the nation in ways that evoke and provoke new forms of appropriation of seemingly competing pasts. Situated in both the historical center of Berlin and the center of former East Berlin, the palace/castle site became the longest running polemic in reunified Berlin’s many spatial controversies, lasting over twenty years and involving nearly every form of civic and political life, from skateboard punks to parliamentary debates. The spatial universe of reunified Berlin is famously saturated with heavily cathected architecture, from postmodern Postdamer Platz to Libeskind’s zigzagging Jewish Museum, from the former SS headquarters known as the Topography of Terror to the restored Reichstag and the decommissioned Tempelhof airport terminal. These all could be regarded as physical places around which collective memory coalesces as a lieu de mémoire.4 Yet collective memory is wanting in explaining these sites in general, and the palace/castle in particular. For historian Pierre Nora, who coined the term, lieux de mémoire appear when history substitutes for memory—where history is a process of problematic and incomplete reconstruction set inexorably against memory as an authentic, unreflective form of communal identity.5 This assumes that history and memory are discrete and in opposition to each other. But in Berlin history and memory are each other’s accomplices, not opponents. Memory is neither opposed to history, nor is it to be conflated with trauma, as Andreas Huyssen has argued in his critique of memory discourses.6 Memory, I submit, is not even the most felicitous analytical category for material legacies and their appropriations. In this chapter I employ the term inheritance, following Yukiko Koga, to capture the play of history and memory at the moment where the not-yet-past meets the not-yet-present.7 The following presents three modes of inheritance at work in the palace/castle site that correspond to acts of appropriation. Beginning with

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the former Palace of the Republic in the context of the GDR’s search for legitimacy and socialist identity, the chapter shows how this history allowed the palace to function as a marker of lost socialist identity after unification, an elegiac mode of inheritance where the socialist past is invested with mourning and melancholia and appropriated through its re-creation as a lost object of desire.8 From there we see how increasing calls to rebuild the imperial castle transformed a question about the socialist past into a conservative discourse in which the socialist era became increasingly invisible as a form of a mythic inheritance, where myth functions to freeze history and lend the illusion of timelessness to an aestheticized past.9 Here the lost object—the Prussian castle—becomes real through a remarkable act of appropriation of the space that results in the castle’s physical reconstruction. The third mode appears during the last months of the Palace of the Republic, when the already vacant building was appropriated as an experimental artistic space known as the Volkspalast (People’s Palace). We discover here a performative mode of inheritance that seeks to disrupt the dynamic of the other two through spectacle. This is an act of appropriation that foregrounds contemporary approaches to the past, rather than debates about meaning of the past. Taken together, these three modes show how inheritance simultaneously compels and undermines fidelity to the past.10

ORIGINS OF A SECULAR TEMPLE The abrupt closing of the Palace of the Republic on September 19, 1990, barely two weeks before reunification, catapulted it from a building on the margins of urban decisions in the new Berlin to a site of cathexis, especially for former East Germans. Had the Palace of the Republic continued to function even one year into unification, its aura might have faded, its numerous restaurants and venues fallen victim to competition and vanished state subsidies, its political function erased and replaced, perhaps, by temporary offices for West German bureaucrats from Bonn. But the East

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German prestige object never got the chance. Instead, the building became a cause célèbre for former Communists and others to highlight what they saw as Western colonial arrogance. It remains difficult for outside observers to make sense of the emotions evoked in the former East Germany by the drawn-out demolition of the Palace of the Republic, and too tempting to assume the workings of an undifferentiated nostalgia.11 Certainly the palace’s popularity was rooted not in its rubber stamp political role as the seat of the ineffectual Communist Party Parliament (the People’s Chamber or Volkskammer), but in its function as a national cultural center boasting thirteen cafés, bars and restaurants, a bowling alley and disco, an art gallery and theater, and a great hall that housed hundreds of conventions, banquets, performances, TV shows, and rock concerts, as well as periodic Communist Party

FIGURE 3.1  Milk Bar in the Palace of the Republic. The palace contained several restaurants and cafés, in addition to theaters and a bowling alley. Photo courtesy of the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Los Angeles.

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congresses (figure 3.1). On its own terms, the palace was a huge success, hosting over sixty million visitors during its fourteen years of existence (1976–1990)—an unparalleled level of public visibility in a country with a total population of no more than seventeen million.12 While the lines of support and opposition to the palace did not break down evenly along East and West, support for the palace was always much stronger in the East, with polls at one point showing 98 percent of East Berliners in favor of preserving the palace.13 It became the focus of demonstrations of up to ten thousand people, supported by citizens groups with names such as the Palace Saviors, Pro-Palace Citizen’s Initiative, or Union for Preservation of the Palace, which also circulated petitions, gathered over one hundred thousand signatures, held protests and vigils, and lobbied politicians. While former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder dismissed the palace as simply “ugly,” ardent advocates of its preservation rallied against the “desecration and denigration” of East German lived experience.14 The emotional investment in the empty palace after unification is rooted in its 1970s origins, when the promises of socialism hovered between the pain of postwar hardship in the fifties and sixties and the irredeemable malaise of cynicism that came to erode the state from within in the eighties. For the generation that came of age in the seventies, the palace was connected to a period of relative stability in the GDR following the period known as détente and West Germany’s policy of “change through rapprochement” under Chancellor Willy Brandt.15 Although by 1973 the GDR had attained much desired international recognition and a UN seat, it bristled at the West German rhetoric of rapprochement, which it feared could undermine its assertion to represent the authentic postwar Germany. To counter any such impression, the GDR undertook an extensive effort to cement its legitimacy through a policy of “disconnection” (Abgrenzung) from the West. The goal of disconnection was to replace the German “culture nation” (which could imply hope of unification) with an exclusive claim to a

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German socialist legacy and thereby insure a usable German past separate from the West.16 The palace was a product of the tension that came from seeking a socialist identity that was to be both quintessentially German and yet distinct from the West. Of direct relevance was a semantic and architectural debate over whether or not to elevate the nineteenth-century German social-democratic tradition of the Volkshaus, or people’s house, as part of GDR’s heritage. Originally a type of secular temple promoted by a nineteenth-century reform movement to address the alienation and inequities faced by workers in early industrializing societies, the Volkshaus movement drew from the British garden city and settlement house movements. It sought to create a space separate from the immorality of the market and the hollow morality of bourgeois society, a space that would avoid both the false consciousness of the church and the false comfort of the pub. Typically, these houses contained meeting halls open to political gatherings, theater troupes, gymnastics, educational classes to improve the minds of workers, and often services for traveling journeymen and soup kitchens for the hungry. They remained popular until they were shuttered or coopted by the Nazis in the 1930s. After the war, the Soviets brought back the Volkshaus to East Germany, but refashioned in a more rigid ideological style as “cultural palaces” that served primarily to indoctrinate rather than socialize. The stern Soviet model of cultural palaces was, from the beginning, in tension with the memory of people’s palaces as places for community and pastime, a tension that grew in intensity as postwar hardship gave way to more free time and disposable income.17 This competition between the two models had a direct impact on the origins of the Palace of the Republic. In the 1960s, GDR Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht took a hard Soviet line against the growing demand for more leisure outlets. Ideological cultivation, not dancing, was the mission of cultural palaces, and if the party gave an inch the people would take a mile: “No freedom for crazies,” warned Ulbricht, “otherwise we will have absolute freedom everywhere!”18 But Ulbricht’s successor,

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Erich Honecker, who rose to the party leadership in 1971, was much more eager to seem attentive to “the people’s” needs.

FROM CENTRAL BUILDING TO WHITE CUBE Honecker pursued what was called “real existing socialism” to take the edge off of revolutionary dogma. His policies led to real increases in housing, raised salaries, shorter workweeks, and increased leisure opportunities, though at the cost of dangerously high national debt.19 Especially in his early years, Honecker sought to achieve what had eluded his predecessor, and this included the construction of a “central building” that could serve both as a national symbol and practical outlet for a population seeking distraction and recreation. A “central building” (Zentrales Gebäude) for Berlin had long been a desired phantom object for the GDR, and Walter Ulbricht had favored plans for a skyscraper along the Soviet model that was to be the tallest building in Germany. Notably, Ulbricht never intended to build directly on the castle’s grave. He incorporated the razed castle site into part of a massive parade ground whose expanse surpassed Moscow’s Red Square. The building that once represented the national body in the form of king and emperor was replaced with the literal bodies of the people by the thousands, in columns and ordered masses, trampling the castle with their boots. Across the Spree River was planned the new “nerve center” of socialist Germany, for whom the parade grounds would be the pivot in its new urban axis of power extending from the Brandenburg Gate to the stretch of neoclassical monoliths along Stalin Boulevard. As a symbol for a socialist future for all of Germany, the planned skyscraper would be the center of what Peter Müller called “an all-embracing work of art” that was to radiate out for one hundred kilometers.20 Continuously planned yet never realized, Ulbricht’s quixotic skyscraper endeavor left the castle site windswept and desolate, an expanse

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that dwarfed even the parades held there.21 For twenty-two years the site, known as Marx-Engels Square, remained open while around it new government buildings rose. Honecker, determined to build what Ulbricht could not and to put his own stamp on it, chose to place his “palace” directly on the site of the former castle, and not across the river from it, as Ulbricht had planned.22 Honecker allowed his architects to design a building that resembled far more the German social democratic model of the people’s house than Ulbricht’s sober Soviet setting for proletarian acculturation.23 The chief architect himself, Heinz Graffunder, wrote openly that the Palace of the Republic implemented the progressive vision of “light-filled people’s houses,” a reference to the once-banned expressionist architect Bruno Taut, and the full original draft name for the building was a semantic compromise between the Soviet and the German approaches: “The Palace of the Republic—the people’s house [Volkshaus] of the GDR.”24 By the time the palace was under construction, the term Volkshaus had come to signal a “yearning for a place that was open to all, thoroughly grounded in the everyday, community building, ideally outside direct state control, and self regulating.”25 There was never a chance of the palace being able to live up to this utopian, indeed counterrevolutionary, ideal, and even the term Volkshaus disappeared entirely from the official name by the time the palace opened. Yet the palace’s official rhetoric and historical positioning lent it an ambiguous aura between the furtherance of state power and the coded possibilities of its transformation, if not transgression.26 Honecker also made sure that the palace would bear no architectural resemblance to the perceived excesses of past socialist state projects, which had strained resources to the point of mass revolt, most notably the construction of Stalin Boulevard (today Frankfurter Allee). That attempt at a neoclassical “architecture of national heritage,” through which the GDR first sought to spatially imprint their new Berlin, nearly cost the government its stability when it became the center of a worker’s uprising on June 17, 1953, suppressed only with the violent help of Soviet

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troops. In contrast, the palace sought to absorb newfound leisure demands while highlighting modernist principles of architecture, back in fashion after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s neoclassical architectural policies as wasteful.27 From this peculiar political constellation the palace emerged as a relatively modest white box (figure 3.2). Its white stone exterior was reminiscent of Bauhaus in its lack of adornment, encased by a modern “curtain wall” of tinted glass. By day the whisky-colored glass and white granite and marble exterior recalled a Russian color scheme that exemplified “elation, solemnity, and lightness,” while by night the palace turned into a transparent lantern.28 The palace was a prime example of GDR modern architecture, drawing from international architectural fashion, from Oscar

FIGURE 3.2  The Palace of the Republic. Palace of the Republic in 1986, looking east

toward the Television Tower. Photo from Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives).

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Niemeyer’s Brasilia to the convention centers of Hamburg and Helsinki and from plans for the never realized Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. Its cube shape, flat roof, steel skeleton, and set-back first floor drew on international-style architecture made famous in Chicago and popular in the fifties and sixties.29 If the outside was unpretentious, the inside was a psychedelic swirl of kitsch and architecturally more interesting, deploying state-of-the-art technology imported from the West to create uniquely mutable spaces, which served as a “synonym for openness and interaction as well as efficiency and flexibility,” referencing its role as a people’s palace in the German tradition.30 The Great Hall could be famously reconfigured in nineteen variations to accommodate audiences between seven hundred to five thousand persons. Polished marble reflected the light from hundreds of globes that gave the palace the nickname “Erich’s Lantern Shop” (referring to Erich Honecker), with a towering glass flower in its grand yet contemporary lobby (figure 3.3). Its 1970s-chic restaurants and discos fashioned a dreamland GDR, “a piece of absurdist theater that blurred the borders between reality and performance.”31 What in the West might seem unbearably kitschy could look unfathomably cool in the GDR as an imitation of the West, and even the bronzed facade, commonplace in Western commercial architecture, was perceived by a young Svetlana Boym on a visit to Berlin from the Soviet Union as “windows of shaded glass that spoke of exotic places and bristled with opportunities.”32 The palace’s cultural program was both its most popular attraction and most controversial legacy after unification. Its cultural events were fully compliant with the party line—they had to be, as they were subject to special scrutiny by the state security apparatus. But as politically correct as most productions were, they often were immensely popular, including social dances, the broadcasting of well-loved television programs like the entertainment show A Cauldron of Color (Ein Kessel Buntes), and even artistically ambitious, as with the Theater in the Palace.33 Advocates for preserving the palace after 1990 never tired of pointing out that 92 or 93 percent of the events that took place in it were “nonpolitical” (in contrast to the overtly “political” party congresses and parliamentary assemblies)

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FIGURE 3.3  The famous Glass Flower in the palace. Main entrance hall, Palace

of the Republic, 1976. Photo by Peter Heinz Junge in the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives).

(figure 3.4).34 This perspective came in for heavy criticism, since, similar to the museums of everyday life explored in the last chapter, many questioned whether anything lay beyond politics in the GDR, especially anything sanctioned by the state. “If this is culture,” commented the Social Democrat Bruno Kneisler about the program in the palace, “we can forget about it.”35

DESCENT INTO THE ARCHIVE The swift end of the palace came just before unification when, in early September 1990, a shocked city inspector stumbled on the palace’s great secret—advanced asbestos contamination—and brought the whole

FIGURE 3.4  Dancing in the Palace. This postcard image comes from a 2009 reproduction by a civil society group to keep the memories of the Palace of the Republic alive. The text reads “Social Dancing in the Palace of the Republic,” using the original, official palace typeface. Author’s collection.

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enterprise to a screeching halt.36 Just weeks after the first freely elected East German parliament voted itself and the GDR out of existence in the palace’s Great Hall on August 26, 1990, the palace went dark, leaving its seventeen hundred employees standing before locked doors. In the months and years to come, the palace lingered as a kind of picture of Dorian Gray: while united Berlin grew younger every day with new construction, grime dulled the palace’s shiny bronze facade, expressing the long visual reverberations of a regime stopped in its tracks. This long good-bye invested the building less with the quality of a commemorative lieu de mémoire in Nora’s sense than as an elegiac site of inheritance, a lamentation for a loss that cannot be properly mourned or, even more important, cannot be properly named. Like the longing for a style of longing in the modernist nostalgia explored in chapter 1, it is difficult to disassociate the mourning for “good times” from mourning for the aura of stability and promise that marked the palace’s presence, especially in the early years, or from a sense of thrill connected to the power of the palace as a political talisman. Such memories—not only of performances but also dinners, weddings, celebrations, coffees, and other moments spent in the palace—acquire a specially charged valence because their context was the cultural legitimation of an authoritarian government, placing them uncomfortably between private recollection and public manipulation. With sixty million visitors over the years, the real question became not whether the events held there were worthy of the name culture, but what it means to have enjoyed one’s self under what today is considered at best compromised circumstances. This is a version of the problem facing any society emerging from an authoritarian regime: when does proximity to power translate into complicity, especially in respect to the seemingly mundane aspects of life? In this sense the palace became a stand-in for the many problems of coming to terms, not with the crimes of the regime per se, but with everyday life under socialism. Ironically, if the palace had been more political in the conventional sense it might have been conceivably integrated into united Germany as a memorial. Yet as a monument

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to enjoyment, no matter how compromised and steeped in folly, it was distinctly unsuitable as a site of commemoration of the GDR in any way, and this irked many East Germans to no end. Stung by the closure of the palace, the civic group Friends of the Palace of the Republic (Freundeskreis Palast der Republik), an East German association representing palace supporters and including former palace employees, launched an exhibit as part of their efforts to “conclusively” demonstrate how “the process of demolition [was] a unique culturalpolitical crime of contemporary German history.”37 With a direct reference toward the old East German equation of West Germany with fascism, they ask provocatively what the difference is between the political “extermination” (Vernichtung) of the palace and the Nazi book burning of 1933. The anger and bitterness is connected to a sense of irretrievable loss, a loss that cannot properly be mourned because the perceived political agenda of the West denies the very legitimacy of their claim that the palace represents something worth commemorating. This dynamic is interpreted by the association as a “desecration” (Vertilgung) and “denigration” (Verunglimpfung) of the “memory world” (Errinerungswelt) of former East Germans. The almost paradigmatic narcissistic identification with the lost object that ensues from the longing for the palace—exemplified by the repeated invocation of the “nonpolitical” good times enjoyed by citizens—elevates melancholy over mourning and can be described as an elegiac form of inheritance.38 Had the palace continued to exist, it may have served to “crystalize and secrete memory” (in Nora’s terms) as a site for open contestation of its meaning.39 But its demolition elevated melancholy over mourning and shifted the focus from the symbolism of the building to the symbolism of its destruction. Under the spell of its asbestos contamination, the palace was referred to colloquially as a corpse, a coffin, a contaminated body, and other metaphors of death and decay.40 This stood in marked contrast to the other government buildings that surrounded it—particularly the Foreign Ministry (finished in 1967 and demolished in 1996 with scant public attention) and the State Council

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building from 1964 (which received landmark status as early as 1993 and became a private university). As those buildings faded into history without controversy, the palace underwent a bizarre dual process of destruction. First, in order to remove the asbestos, it was subject to a state-organized “backwards planning process” (rückwärtsgewandter Entwurfsprozess) where, in the manner of a Borges story, preservation teams went into the still intact palace prior to its gutting to identify objects that should survive into the future. These teams drew on thirteen thousand original plan drawings found in the archives, amassing massive detail about a world in order to re-create it and thereby allow for its destruction. Catalogued and stored in the suburb of Spandau (where the famous prison once held the Nazi architect Albert Speer) one can find to this day a dissected form of the palace in storage. The palace’s former youth club, for example, has been dismantled and catalogued in twenty-two detailed segments with labels such as No.1k 430 Pos.7 (for the disc jockey’s console).41 Its first burial ground, therefore, was not a memorial but the archive. Elegiac inheritance is perhaps distinguished by the replacement of commemoration with archivization, symbolizing the end point of a process of disappearance that moves from decline to ruin to archive. West Berliners, bemoaned Green Party politician Hans-Christian Ströbele, want the material evidence of the GDR, “in a book or in film, but not on the street anymore, not around us.”42 “Where ruins are no longer visible,” writes Hartmut Böhme , “memory has no purchase or it must vanish into text.”43 Archivization here thus appears as a form of victor’s justice, along with the changing of street names, the removal of monuments, and the controversial privatization of state-owned enterprises.44 When, in this general rhetorical vein, the historian Joachim Fest wrote the year after unification that the reconstruction of the royal Prussian castle would symbolize Communism’s failure and set right a historical wrong, this idea seemed at the time provocative rather than prescriptive, and few people could have imagined it as more than rhetoric.45 Yet it presciently set the stage for the palace’s demolition to make way for the castle and a decidedly different form of inheritance.

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FROM THE ABSENCE OF PRESENCE . . . The calls for replacing the Palace of the Republic with a rebuilt castle began in earnest soon after it became clear that the palace was mortally wounded. Western conservative public figures, notably Fest, the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler, and the businessman Wilhelm von Boddien, combined historical knowledge, a well-defined aesthetic, and political clarity to turn a fanciful idea into a convincing narrative of loss and redemption in which a rebuilt castle became the linchpin of unified German normalcy. Why did the idea catch on so quickly, and remain with such tenacity? The strength of the argument is not the answer but rather the question to be explained. Had the castle not been destroyed, it would likely have remained uncontroversial. But, as Goerd Peschken notes, following the logic of desecration, Ulbricht’s “razing of the castle ruins enabled the castle as the symbol of the legitimate, the entire, the proper Germany,” and through the advocacy of the Western conservatives its absence came to exert a powerful presence.46 Long ignored or forgotten by postwar generations, the vanished castle was presented no more as belonging to the past but as glaringly and urgently missing from the present and, in its lack, summoning a powerful yearning: In the old days, “if one came from the direction of the Tiergarten Park through the Brandenburg Gate, [the castle’s] dark mass loomed in the distance and anchored the Unter den Linden,” wrote Siedler in an influential essay that became the rallying cry for castle advocates, “but today one asks oneself, why does the Unter den Linden run eastward at such a curious diagonal and end in nothing? Even the empty, lost and purposeless ‘Palace of the Republic’—a monument to the Honecker regime that resembles a provincial department store—leads one to deduce that at one time something must have been here.”47 Something must have been there, something that can be deduced in its spectrality from the curious nothing at the end of the boulevard. The Palace of the Republic gives no clue; its monstrous banality merely accentuates the absence. That something, in von Boddien’s words, is “the

MAP 3.1  Location of the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik) and Berlin City Castle (Stadtschloss).

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phantom pain of a former architectural majesty.” The castle, explains von Boddien, was “the crystallization point of a force field that, once removed from the texture of the city, resulted in the unhinging of an organic order [die Ordnung des Ganzen].”48 Strictly speaking, the unhinging refers to the planning of the city center around the castle, but the phantom pain expands to cover a Berlin fragmented by misguided experiments, foreign occupations, and misshapen identities. Castle advocates readily admit that the Nazi era is certainly one of these misguided experiments, but the failure of the National Socialists to make good on their redesign of Berlin (other than by inviting its destruction by bombs) makes the postwar years the prime target of conservative aesthetic disapprobation. Whether East or West, postwar planning, as a conservative Christian Democratic politician, Marc Schüffner, put it, leaves an “impression that ahistorical contemporary architecture manifests a downright hatred for the past,” resulting in numerous “construction sins” (Bau-Sünden) that include (in his opinion) the Zoo Train Station in the West and the Palace of the Republic in the East.49 While even for its conservative critics modernism may here and there have produced an intellectually compelling building, in general, pro-castle conservatives view modern urban planning as an unmitigated disaster: “Wherever in the last half century the attempt was made to design a city and its center from a void, its realization lead to a debacle which now confronts the next generation, in Brasilia, in Dacca, in Chandigar,” writes Siedler; “one is skeptical, even pessimistic, regarding the faith in the ability of our time to reconnect a historic city, especially to give a city its center.”50 Modernist antipathy to the nineteenth-century city has long aroused the ire of traditionalists. Immediately after the war, modernist architects such as Hans Scharoun, fleetingly Berlin’s building and housing director in 1946, famously referred to the bombing as a “mechanical decongestant” that presented planners with unexpected opportunities to reshape the “decayed corpse” of Berlin (as Walter Gropius referred to the city in 1945).51 Flush with this sense of historic opportunity, modernism in the fifties and sixties seemed to usher in a new society premised on clarity, transparency and functionality. But it was also ideologically charged,

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first with Americans supporting international-style architecture in the West to counter the pomposity of Stalinist architecture in the East and then by its Eastern appropriation in acres of prefabricated buildings premised on visions that “resemble a nightmare from expressionist films.”52 The conservative critique of the palace as failed modernism must therefore be seen as a continuation of what Gavriel Rosenfeld refers to as the West German “architects’ debate” from the 1980s over which architectural tradition most represented a “fascist” legacy.53 In this debate, modernists were put on the defensive as the postmodern left and “rationalist” right sought to puncture modernism’s moral claim to democratic values and instead assert modernism’s continuity with the Nazi era, thereby reclaiming neoclassical architecture for democracy.54 In words that would, decades later, almost directly mirror arguments in favor of rebuilding the castle, the controversial West German architect Leon Krier argued in the 1980s that modernism wrongly associated neoclassical architecture with Nazism and, furthermore, had willfully blighted postwar Germany. Krier “urged the return to the eternally valid principles of neoclassical architecture,” freed from association with fascism, as Rosenfeld puts it, “as the best means to repair the damaged city.”55 At stake in the debate was the question of what it means to take responsibility for the past, anticipating the contours of the later, and more famous, historians’ debate (Historikerstreit) about the uniqueness of Nazism.56 This latter debate was widely regarded on the political center/left as an apologetic attempt to relativize Nazi crimes, yet its high visibility and intense public resonance spoke to a widespread desire to escape from the trauma of the war, whether as perpetrators or victims, and to find refuge in being “normal.”57 The rationale for the return of the castle is a direct extension of these debates over whether postwar Germany constitutes a rupture or continuity with fascism, whether the Nazi era was itself an accident of history or the logical consequence of Prussian militarism, and whether architecture can transcend historical meaning.58 The Western German conservative view of modernism as fundamentally misguided set the often crude ideological terms of the debate about the rebuilding of the castle. Hans Stimmann, Berlin’s building director

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from 1991–1996 and an inheritor of the rationalist tradition, imposed under the guise of “critical reconstruction” what his many critics termed the dogma of the nineteenth century. Taking office one year after unification, Stimmann saw in modern Berlin an illegible “museum for every failed city planning attempt since 1945.”59 As building director, he famously privileged prewar constellations of density and blocks; he recalled upon taking office, “I had a drawer and I opened it up and pulled out the old city plan. It worked for 250 years. Why do we need a new competition?”60 He imposed drastic restrictions on building heights and facade materials, openly seeking to restore a past that he equated with the “European city.” Just as Scharoun briefly saw in the immediate postwar era the opportunity for a new, rationalized, Berlin emerging out of the destruction of allied bombs, so did Stimmann see in the immediate unification era the opportunity for a postwar reconstruction that had never been possible due to the occupation, the division, and the influence of modernism. Stimmann’s favored old city plan was known as the black plan, which showed a dense image of prewar buildings in black in contrast to the postwar white empty space left by the bombings and the division. As Karen Till explains, the black plan was considered by one of its earliest proponents, Paul Kleihues, to be “the permanent gene structure of the city” that lent Berlin its spirit, culture, and character. Stimmann conceived of urban planners as editors revising a mangled manuscript, “correcting spelling mistakes” (i.e., undoing the postwar) and filling in the empty spaces (fading from white to black), especially in the dead space of the empty center. From a “tattered Cinderella’s dress,” as the federal building minister put it, unified Berlin under Stimmann was to emerge as a princess, clothed in updated Wilhelmin urbanity—clean, cool, and corporate.61

 . . . TO THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE In this context, then, von Boddien and Siedler presented the castle as the key to the genetic structure of the city, to its spirit and culture, echoing Aldo Rossi’s 1960s antimodernist argument that traditional urban forms

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were “archetypes” deep in humanity’s collective unconscious.62 Against the architectural majesty of the castle, the Communist Palace of the Republic merely contributed to the “aesthetic chaos and noise” of nontraditional architecture, further ruining a “ruined” city.63 The castle became elevated from a notable example of baroque architecture to the only building that could redeem the city from the various destructions visited upon it. Accordingly, the palace became, in von Boddien’s phrase, a “foreign body” (Fremdkörper), with a “shape [Gestalt] that destroys the cityscape.”64 Its demolition appeared predestined since it stood in the sway of the castle, where the castle defines the center, the center defines the cityscape, the cityscape defines identity, and identity is necessary to realize the goal of being a true world city. Thus, practically speaking, the palace must yield, explains Siedler, “not primarily because it is a symbol of a shattered state, nor because its architectural mediocrity mars all that stands near. Equally important is that this socialist multi-use hall stands at the wrong place at the wrong angle and its proportions are insufficient to bind together Knobelsdorff ’s opera building, Nering’s armory, Boumann’s university, and Schinkel’s museum.”65 Conversely, the castle must be rebuilt not primarily because of its own merit, but because without it the other buildings around lose any sense of order and coherence.66 Absence in this way became newly palpable. The public is told to see a missing castle—“why does the Unter den Linden run eastward at such a curious diagonal and end in nothing?” Now that Berlin knows what is missing, according to this logic, the city finds it cannot really live without it. Under other circumstances, such a realization leads to mourning or to its unsuccessful counterpart, melancholia, as in the elegiac mode described in the previous section. But, in a twist, the advocates of the castle offer desire in place of mourning and tantalizingly connect desire with agency. In a country where so much has been irrevocably destroyed, where the past is a minefield of guilt and regret, the castle can be rebuilt. Invoking absence alone, however, was insufficient to garner the public opinion necessary to turn dreams into reality: some form of presence, even in the form of an apparition, was called for. This apparition took shape

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when von Boddien arranged for ten thousand square meters of fabric to be stretched over scaffolding erected along the footprint of the former Castle for fifteen months starting June 30, 1993. The fabric was hand-painted by thirty artists with a life-size trompe l’oeil image of the castle under the direction of Parisian painter Catherine Feff. Based on a more radical idea by Goerd Peschken and Frank Augustin, von Boddien’s variation presented the castle as promise.67 To add to the illusion, the real Palace of the Republic, stubbornly sticking partly out behind the scaffolding, was hidden behind mirrors that reflected the painted fabric (figure 3.5). The apparition was a sensation. Inside the scaffolding was an exhibit about the castle attended by 130,000 people, a sort of coming out party after 43 years of taboo. The event was a form of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1995 wrapping of the Reichstag in reverse: instead of a historically burdened building disappearing under shimmering silver polypropylene fabric, a historically forgotten building was made visible.68 This stunning visualization was, as the director of the castle information center put it to me, the “breakthrough” moment in the “struggle” (kampf ) for the castle.

FIGURE 3.5  Castle simulation 1993. A picture of the simulated castle, with the Palace of the Republic hidden by mirrors, as part of an exhibit called The Castle in Berlin 1993. The effect comes from fabric hand-painted to look like the castle and stretched over scaffolding (lead artist Catherine Feff ). This event was a watershed in the campaign to rebuild the castle. Photo by Michael Haddenhorst.

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By this time, numerous groups supporting the rebuilding of the castle were taking shape. Most prominent was von Boddien’s Berlin Palace Association, but also the Society for Historic Berlin, the Society for Rebuilding the Castle, the Berlin City Castle Initiative, and the Forum for Berlin’s City Image. Some advocates sought an exact replica, down to the interior details, while others, notably von Boddien’s group, were satisfied with reproducing the exterior and allowing a modern interior that could be used for public or commercial purposes (various early proposals for use included a government guesthouse, a luxury hotel, a library, or a conference center).69 Von Boddien, who eventually carried the day, deftly adopted a public relations campaign that used the tools of modern marketing, commodification, and image manipulation adapted from his experience as a savvy Western businessman. His unsuccessful pro-palace opponents, often under umbrella organizations in which the former East German Communists played a large role, relied on more conventional methods of protest and petitions that failed to capture the public imagination. The use of scaffolding and painted cloth to conjure the old castle was more than just a brilliant act of street theater; rather it was a philosophy of architecture that invoked the postmodern in the service of neoconservative goals.70 Von Boddien was unpopular among historic preservationists because he showed little interest in actually preserving any of the original foundations still to be found under the former parade ground. Nor was he popular among advocates of historical restoration who called for an accurate reconstruction of the entire castle. Von Boddien’s concern with authenticity stopped at rebuilding the facades that fit a once and future picture postcard image. This was largely in keeping with the position that Vittorio Lampugnani, a castle advocate, had staked out in the architects’ debate decades earlier, where architecture possessed “no inherent meaning” and thus could be redeployed to fit the needs of the day without historical baggage.71 For von Boddien, the essence of a building lies in its architectural plans, which can be endlessly reproduced in broad strokes without undue concern for the authenticity of historic tradition.72 This is indeed postmodernism in the service of neoconservatism, for, as Didem Ekici notes, von Boddien is essentially contesting Walter

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Benjamin’s argument that works of art have “auras” that cannot survive the transformation from original to copy. Ekici argues that von Boddien is closer to Gilles Deleuze’s take on the simulacrum in which superficial resemblance to the original does not drain aura but creates it anew. Where Benjamin might have seen a rebuilt castle as a commodifed reproduction that amounts to little more than a parody of the original, von Boddien states bluntly that the original edifice, as such, never existed: when the castle was destroyed in 1950, he contends, it was merely a copy of itself, since it had been constantly renovated over the centuries, making any concept of the original inadequate.73 This leads to a delicious contradiction, fitting for German dialectitians: “the ‘authentic identity’ of Berlin can only be fulfilled by an architecture freed from the burden of authenticity,” or, in other words, one can only restore authenticity by denying it.74

THE PRUSSIAN AURA There is, however, a contradiction in von Boddien’s reliance on the impossibility of the original as a justification for rebuilding the castle. The entire discourse exemplified here by von Boddien and Siedler relies on the restoration of the castle as it appeared at a specific moment in time, namely, the end of the German Empire. It is only this version, and none other, that advocates claim can restore the city to its organic wholeness. Thus it is the aura of the original—at least the original as bounded by historical time— that is sought. It is precisely the aura in its dictionary sense of unique ambience or imperceptible influence, and not any royalist revisionism, that is desired. But what is this aura produced by the simulacrum of the castle, either in its cloth and scaffolding or brick and mortar form? The answer lies in the architectural ensemble of the city center made legible by the castle: the adjacent museums, opera, theater, and university that represent the Prussian emperors’ gambit for cultural legitimacy as an integral part of imperial rule. Only in Berlin, Siedler maintains, were the

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architectural expressions of art and science so intimately connected to the imperial residence through urban planning: “It is notable that the greatest efforts in building of the monarchy in the aftermath of unexpected victory in the Napoleonic wars was neither kingly palaces nor stately representational edifices but rather museums and Schinkel’s theater, sites of bourgeois education and formation [Bildung]. . . . [Berlin in the nineteenth century] was first and foremost a city of cultural/educational buildings [Bildungsbauten] followed by the architecture of trade and industry.”75 The aura then, is in a word Prussia, which remains an ambiguous inheritance for united Germany. Prussia symbolizes the successful struggle to unify the disparate German lands over centuries, overcoming disunity to “complete” German history.76 The relative tolerance and cultural beneficence of Frederick the Great looms large, as does antidemocratic militarism and authoritarianism, especially under Emperor Wilhem II, the xenophobic nationalist who led Germany into the First World War. During the 1970s, conservative Western historians, hoping to keep the question of unification open during the normalization of relations between the two German states, saw an opportunity to stress a common German identity through valorizing Prussia. The so-called Prussian wave of this period, which sought to make Prussia a “masterable past,” was a direct precursor (along with the architects’ debate) to the historians’ debate” of the West Germany of the eighties that sought to do the same for the Nazi era. Both sought to deemphasize German historic uniqueness in its waging wars of aggression. What Dominick LaCapra calls the “phantasm of total mastery” over the past became championed as the measure of normalcy.77 This search for a “normal” past, however, was quickly criticized, most prominently by Jürgen Habermas, as an unacceptable relativization oaf German crimes, leaving the debates mired in rancorous controversy.78 The Prussian culture of obedience, discipline, and (especially under Wilhelm II) cruelty in war in the colonies and in Europe remains a controversial legacy, especially in regard to its influence on the rise of the National Socialists.79

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After reunification in 1990, however, the valence of Prussia shifted, and the three hundredth anniversary of the kingdom in 2001 saw a celebration of the “Prussian year” in which Prussia assumed the contours of a “mastered” past that could not only be discussed without guilt or fear but also consumed for aesthetic pleasure, from its regal buildings to “I Love Prussia” T-shirts.80 Siedler’s noting of Berlin as first and foremost a city of Bildung drew on the legacy of Prussia as cultural enlightenment: enlightened absolutism, to be sure, but enlightenment that produced magnificent museums, repositories of world knowledge, and championed “classical beauty and proportion in German public life.”81 Rosenfeld sees in this cultural rehabilitation the creation of an “accessible legacy” that retrofits the dominant image of Prussia as a militarist millstone: “Viewed from a predominantly cultural perspective, Prussia was not only less controversial, it could even be lighthearted, entertaining, and fun. In a word, it was starting to appear normal.”82 Prussia appears as the elusive era that historian Golo Mann sought in 1985 when, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, he advocated for embracing the “color and experience” of a “more distant and harmless past . . . instead of reopening old wounds and quarreling about guilt and blamelessness, right and wrong, good and bad, concerning events that occurred fifty years ago.”83

CASTLE MOVES Nowhere, notes Rosenfeld, was the shift to cultural interest in Prussia as clear as in the public interest in reconstructing old Prussian buildings.84 This context is critical for understanding the willingness of the Federal Parliament to agree to lobbying efforts by advocates for rebuilding the castle. Despite initial skepticism, the turning point in making the reconstructed castle a reality came along with a proposal from the Prussian Cultural Foundation to move its non-European exhibits—art and artifacts from Africa, the Americas, East Asia, and India—to the planned

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castle from their location in Dahlem on the outskirts of the city. These would be joined by scientific collections from the Humboldt University and non-European literature from the Central Regional Library to become a “showcase of world knowledge and world culture.” While the exterior would always be referred to as the castle, as an institution it was now to be called the Humboldt Forum after the famous Prussian brothers, the philosopher, linguist, former Prussian education minister and founder of Berlin’s university, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and his famous explorer, naturalist, and scientist brother Alexander. Under their name the castle would acquire a “universal importance.”85 The Humboldt Forum formula was key for parliamentary approval to build the castle and provide partial federal funding. Even though the content of the building was subordinate to its form, the lack of a coherent use concept had been a major stumbling block in gaining approval and funding from the government to rebuild. Architects could ill afford to design a building that would, ex post facto, be adaptable to an as yet unknown use. It was therefore the magic formula of the Humboldt Forum that convinced first a panel of outside experts and later the Federal Parliament to give the castle the green light. On July 4, 2002, the German Bundestag voted for a new building to be “built according to the ground plan and in the stereometry, i.e., the external dimensions of the Berlin City Castle.” An architectural competition would determine the interior and the east facade, but the Parliament required exact replicas of the north, south, and west facades, the so-called Schlüter courtyard (named after its architect), and the dome (figure 3.6).86 The vote, of course, vindicated von Boddien and sealed the fate of the Palace of the Republic, condemned to demolition since 1993 but kept alive since then by an absence of funds and political will. The official reason for removing the palace was thus ultimately not because of its East German legacy or its controversial asbestos-related problems, but because it stood in the way of the castle: the Humboldt Forum, as the government simply put it, “entails the demolition of the Palace of the Republic.”87 Although

FIGURE 3.6  “The castle will be built.” Free newspaper published by castle support-

ers with the headline “Now it’s official: The Berlin castle will be built.” The image shows the view down Unter den Linden with a rendering of the once and future castle at the end. Author’s collection.

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the government shied away from discussing the political dimensions of the palace, it became squarely associated with (illegitimate) power, while the castle came to stand for culture. This culture, rooted in Prussian enlightened absolutism, came to represent a normal past that signals continuity with European traditions rather than divergence. The old castle had been a metonym for the monarchy, and now the Humboldt Forum was to become the metonym for an enlightened image of Prussia. Conservative newspapers lauded the government decision, calling the castle “the symbolic center of Germany . . . a building . . . which represents the will of the German people to be a nation,” a “return to Germany history.”88 In this ideal vision of the nation, unified Germany would dialectically return to Prussian virtues and values of tolerance, thrift, and law, while making these compatible with Germany as a responsible European partner and with Berlin as a cosmopolitan global city. The castle can, in this view, once again restore the organic order whose lack von Boddien lamented and in so doing liberate Germany from the false paths of socialism and Nazism, from the misguided dystopias of modernism, and by implication from the semisovereign years of the cold war. The decision to place the non-European “other” literally inside the facades of the quintessentially European castle as part of the Humboldt Forum raised the hackles of critics for whom it smacked of imperial hubris and recalled human exhibits from the colonial era.89 Yet the castle/ Humboldt Forum succeeded so far because it offers something for (almost) everyone. On the metaphysical level it offers redemption in the double form of reversing the Communist destruction of the castle and returning to Berlin and to Germany that which restores faith in the self— the “courage to tradition” as Green Party official and former parliamentary vice president Antje Vollmer put it.90 On the practical level it offers prominent institutions a choice location in the historical center and recaptures history in a way that also captures tourists, which in turn promises to be good for the local economy and for Berlin’s reputation. After all, Siedler writes, “all great European cities are unthinkable without their palaces.”91 The castle advocates’ narrative of national coherence ultimately creates a myth, in Roland Barthes’s sense where myth gives the illusion of

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timelessness through a double movement: history is presented as frozen, that is, removed from the flow of time, and thus its traces are made invisible.92 If the elegiac mode of inheritance struggles with frustrated commemoration, the mythic resists commemorating the past but seeks to make it a timeless part of the present. Although a longing for simpler times percolates in both, the mythic mode’s equivalent modality to the East German valorization of personal experience is aestheticization. The castle’s beauty is perceived as the key to the beauty of the city, and for this form not function is paramount. Prussian aesthetics—order, simplicity, solidity—are to filter down to the individual, who ideally moves within a city that once again, as Stimmann put it, “looks like Berlin.”93

APPROPRIATING THE RUINS The discourses surrounding castle and palace are an excellent example of built space as an empty signifier. Through the debates in the 1990s and well into the 2000s, in neither case did the building(s) in question exist outside the realm of projection, for even though the palace building still stood it had long since lost its function. Discussions circled between imagination and absence: the imagination of the castle as represented through photographs, plans, and paintings; the absence of the palace fixing its meaning both as carrier of GDR identity and symbolizing the injustices of unification.94 Or inverted: the absence of the castle as the condition of its imagining, the imagination of the palace as a condition of its absence. In this discursive context of phantasmagoria it is easy to forget that the physical Palace of the Republic continued to exist for eighteen postunification years, too costly to demolish, too “dangerous” to leave intact with its asbestos and rampant politicization. Its demolition had been delayed seemingly indefinitely due to funding, logistics, and appeals. As a first step, the asbestos was to be removed, but this process began only in 1998, eight years after its closure and itself took five years. Removing the asbestos required gutting the building (entkernen, or literally

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coring or pitting it). This was a process that critics, still hoping to stay its demolition, referred to as a “renovation unto death” (Totsanierung).95 When the asbestos removal was finished in 2003, the palace reemerged as an expanse of concrete and steel girders, its Great Hall’s tiered seating now reduced to stadium bleachers suspended in a giant erector set. In this shape the palace assumed a third dimension hovering between its previous life and deferred death—the prospect of its use in a ruined state. Officially free of asbestos and ritually cleansed of communism, structurally sound and politically embattled, it stood as the largest usable indoor space in central Berlin. The Regional Finance Office (Oberfinanzdirektion), which was operationally responsible for the palace, was not blind to commercial possibilities, and there were calls from the media and Berliners to “open the palace” to the (re)public. Thus by 2004, nearly fifteen years after the end of the GDR, the palace was suddenly not just a foregone conclusion but an open question on its use and by implication its future. This led to initial events held in its shell—tours of the ruins, a disembodied production of Wagner called The Wagner Complex, some lectures, a theater evening—and culminated in two commercial events. First was the surreal appearance of 130 lifelike replicas of the Xian Terra Cotta warriors from China set against the half-light and steel beams of the palace, dimly echoing the military parades that took place for decades on that very site. This was followed by the German Federation of Industry celebrating its annual conference, with gleeful irony, in the ruins of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The international consulting firm McKinsey planned its fortieth anniversary party in the palace. The ruins had become part of a globalized Berlin chic.96 These occasional events were justified by the International Expert Commissions’s recommendation that, as long as it cost the city no money, public use of the palace was desirable to keep the area “lively” until financing was available to complete the demolition.97 This directive firmly planted the palace in the forefront of a debate over public space, where its aesthetic power exerted an intoxicating pull: “The gigantic steel frame, braced by cement stairwells and floors reduced to their poured concrete

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slabs, possessed a ruin-like and arresting rawness, a tremendous empty space between parking garage and industrial ruin, in the city center, sheathed in a now half destroyed, brown mirror-glass facade” (figure 3.7).98 The ruin seemed to beg for appropriation by any means. In the early days of the palace’s emptiness, before it was used for commercial events, skateboard punks snuck in, known nationwide by pseudonyms taken from the film Reservoir Dogs: Mr. Orange, Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue.99 These anonymous yet public skateboarders were the unintended harbinger of the palace’s role as ruin, conjuring up both the notion of horror vacui—Aristotle’s expression of the elemental desire of space to fill itself as a corollary to cenophobia, the pathological fear of empty spaces—and terra nullius, land that belongs to none but can be reclaimed by those who put it to use.100 In consuming the building without producing anything, notes the curator Florian Waldvogel, the punks

FIGURE 3.7  Palace interior after asbestos removal. People lining up to tour the

palace after it had been gutted to remove asbestos. December 30, 2005. Photo by Elke Wetzig. Creative Commons License.

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subverted the productive role implicit in the construction of buildings while denaturalizing the abstract space in a situationist-like takeover.101 With this, the palace came to be absorbed into what Michel de Certeau calls the tactics of “secondary production” of everyday life, moving it away from the melancholy undertones and East-West overlay of the castle versus palace debate and making the space ripe for appropriation.102

CITIZEN’S ARREST OF TIME The decisive appropriation was instigated by a group of young architects and artists frustrated with the architectural debates of a city where, as Phillip Oswalt wrote, “Germans do not dream of a different future, but a different past.”103 In early 2003 a core group of predominantly but not exclusively Western-trained architects, producers, curators, and artists from their mid twenties to mid forties, with support from the larger avantgarde cultural scene in Berlin and beyond, formed the BetweenPalacesUse Association (ZwischenPalastNutzung e.V.) emerging from efforts the previous year by a research group of architects and planners called Urban Catalyst for temporary use of the palace.104 The association struggled to make socially relevant use of the “unmasked dissonances and ironic refractions” offered by the palace’s haunting presence.105 The generational difference is particularly salient, for the protagonists of the elegiac and mythic discourses tended to be over fifty and socialized into the respective debates of the cold war. This younger, elite group did not seek political mobilization per se, but felt the need to stake a claim on the urban fabric of the city in opposition to the ideologically conservative trend set by Hans Stimmann’s building ordinances and von Boddien’s ardent pursuit of the castle. For the younger architects especially, the question was how to maintain contingency and ambiguity in urban design without slipping into the authoritarian molds they critiqued. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre for inspiration, they asked how to be true to his call for reflective engagement with one’s own complicity.106

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Unlike earlier generations, the complicity is not primarily with the crimes of the past but with what one participant labeled the “awkward, uptight, and insensitive handling” of the past in the present.107 The palace was presented as a symbol of a currently mismanaged approach to the past rather than a misunderstood symbol of the past. The challenge was to find a way to recode and decode the building without mystifying it, to make it do justice to the burdens of history through the very opposite, by unburdening: “Loading the building with too much meaning,” offered Rem Koolhas on this point, “paralyzes thinking.”108 Although the cultural policy speaker of the conservative Christian Democratic Union grumbled that “Berlin has no lack of perverse performance sites,” the association finally convinced the authorities to allow a limited series of cultural events.109 Their concept was inspired by Cedric Price’s “anti-architecture,” represented by his 1960s Fun Palace (which also served as an inspiration for the Pompidou Center in Paris), and his radical ideas about the inherent openness and instability of architecture and the spatial dimensions of time. Like Price, who proposed manuals for dismantling a building when its usefulness was past, the idea that the palace would be destroyed was never denied. The transitory nature of the structure was the point.110 For their events, the association chose the name Volkspalast to consciously merge the erstwhile concepts of the Volkshaus (people’s house) and the Kulturpalast (cultural palace). They sought a dreamscape where once Honecker conjured a dreamland and castle advocates dream of a different past. The artistic resonance was huge, drawing participants from all over the globe. Nine hundred events, with over 550,000 visitors, were spread over two three-month periods in 2004 and 2005.111 In one, the basement of the palace was flooded, and visitors were guided in rubber rafts through a labyrinthine “city of facades” that gave the viewer the agency to decide on what city edifices to demolish. A Bal Moderne invited the public to whirl and twirl with two semioticians who discover the cradle of disco in 1970s Texas. Extreme sports were showcased, and choreographer Sasha Waltz created a temporal and spatial exploration where dancers started in the former foyer space and then strayed across the barren concrete of the

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entire massive building, the audience following the dancers. The internationally known German noise band Einstürzende Neubauten (meaning “collapsing new buildings”), themselves originally famous for making instruments from drills, hammers, and steel stolen from construction sites and hardware stores, performed from their recent album, titled, appropriately, Palace of the Republic. From January to May 2005 the Norwegian artist Lars Ramberg installed the German word Zweifel (“doubt”) in sixmeter-high white neon letters on top of the palace building. Soon a mountain appeared in the vast interior of the palace, its glacial summit poking above the roof into Berlin. Known as Der Berg (The Mountain), artists built a giant walk-in installation from scaffolding, plywood, and a crystalline skin that could reflect images and transform itself into vastly different landscapes through projectors (figure 3.8). While the

FIGURE 3.8  Volkspalast—The Mountain (Der Berg). Part of the art installation Volkspalast—The Mountain (Der Berg) as part of the temporary use of the Palace of the Republic by artists who sought to unsettle people’s perception of the space. The photo shows the 144-foot-high Mountain Crystal Inn (Gasthof Bergkristall). Project by Markus Bader and Jan Liesegang, Raumlabor Berlin with Alexander Römer. 2005. Photo by david baltzer/bildbuehne.de.

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mountain rose from inside the building, in front was a “Mountain Hotel” with rooms, reception, and lake that offered an overnight lodging experience. A mountain in the palace, explained Deufelhard and Oswalt, “was similarly pointless and as detached from social and spatial context as the romantic idea of reconstructing the Prussian Castle. The Mountain is implanted from another space, the Prussian Castle from another time.”112 On the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2004, the palace was swallowed whole by 750,000 watts of light in a performance piece called Supernova (figure 3.9). “Really,” wrote the

FIGURE 3.9  “Dying is also an art”: Supernova light and sound installation in the palace. A light and sound art performance to simulate explosion of the Palace of the Republic. The performance lasted one hour, from 11 pm to midnight on November 9, 2004 (the anniversary of both the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht in 1938, events that signal the multiplicity of pasts operating in Berlin’s memory landscape). It drew more than sixteen hundred viewers. The word in the center of the palace means “Eternity.” Photo and project by Harriet und Peter Meining, LPG (Olaf Brusdeylins, Paul Göschel, Thomas Fißler, Falk Lehmann, Reinhardt v. Bergen), and Nikolaus Woernle, produced by Theater Hebbel am Ufer Berlin.

FIGURE 3.9  (continued )

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artists, “we would have liked to have blown it up.”113 This simulated explosion, under the motto “Dying is also an art,” merged, in a literal flash, the history of two palaces that both once occupied the center of Berlin. By prefiguring the demolition of the palace, it served simultaneously as a symbolic funeral pyre to bid farewell, as a form of euthanasia for an already sick building slowly being “renovated to death,” and as a metaphor for the last months when the Volkspalast was Berlin’s biggest spectacle. A supernova, after all, is when a dying star burns brighter than ever at the moment of its demise. The Volkspalast explicitly rejected the elegiac and mythic modes of inheritance as unsuitable for reflective engagement with the past. Reminiscent of 1960s happenings, it sought to transform the discourse through performance that took place in, about, and through the palace, which became both the object and the subject of the action. We could call this a performative inheritance, in the sense that Derrida speaks of performative interpretation as “an interpretation that transforms the very thing that it interprets.”114 Through performative inheritance, the Volkspalast transforms the very thing that it inherits. It calls the ghosts of the past and then undermines their mythic power to narrative coherence by juxtaposition and citation. One sees this, for example, in the original proposal for the Volkspalast concept, entitled “1,000 Days” which proposed “1,000 people initiating 1,000 projects, who can decide a thousand times about everything and nothing” in order to say farewell to the Palace of the Republic in exactly the same one-thousand-day time frame as it was constructed.115 Besides the reference to the palace’s construction in one thousand days, invocation of the phrase one thousand days echoes the Nazi fantasy of a thousand-year-long empire. Here the desire to effect a proper burial of the palace through a farewell ritual playfully connects the palace to German history and mythology while privileging, in its call to “decide a thousand times about everything and nothing,” the decisive manners of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. At best, this performative mode comes closest to what Dominick LaCapra regards as successful “working through” of the past in the sense

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of “a continual rethinking and reworking rather than speculative synthesis or Aufhebung.”116 But this approach comes with the risk of romanticizing the performative, leading older-generation observers, especially from the left, to see in the Volkspalast the overly ironic pursuits of relatively privileged actors entrapped by the same forces they seek to critique. After all, the Volkspalast did not change the outcome of the demolition or government’s approval of the castle. That it explicitly did not seek to change this outcome can be interpreted as either the mark of sophistication or sophistry. After all, the stated goals of the idea of the Volkspalast included a conscious taking leave of the palace; “a critical and innovativeexperimental confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the history, the present, and the future of the site”; the desire to influence future discussions about the site; and, using the symbolism of the site, to inform the public about “innovative and new forms of urban life.”117 These were certainly achieved, but for its critics the Volkspalast raised the question of the limits of societal influence and susceptibility to co-optation inherent in such a critical, playful, consciousness-raising enterprise. As sympathetic critic Bruno Flierl wondered at the appropriation of Price’s Fun Palace concept: “ ‘fun’ for whom and what kind of ‘fun’ in a context where ‘fun’ is already thoroughly commercialized?”118

BUILDING BACKWARD The greatest palace performance of all was not the Volkspalast, however, but the actual demolition. Starting in December 2005, the palace was gradually stripped of its skin, its steel beams forming a stark industrial ruinscape before being removed, leaving the original supporting stairwells, eerily reminiscent of guard towers along the Berlin Wall, the abandoned turrets of ancient fortresses, or some modernist Stonehenge. This process was formally known as “reverse building” (Rückbau), to formally distinguish it from Ulbricht’s explosive demolition of the castle in 1950, and it proceeded slowly due to the logistics of removing twenty thousand tons

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of steel resting on a concrete “bathtub” sunk nine meters (thirty feet) into the wet sand of the Spree riverbank.119 Removing the steel weight would cause the bathtub to pop to the surface and endanger the river and surrounding buildings. As a result, it had to be drained and filled with sand. The overall costs were enormous, exceeding sixty million Euros. The palace’s concrete was broken into small pieces and sold to a Dutch firm that turned it into pavement. Its steel beams were sawed into pieces and shipped by barge to be melted down and sold, some to China, some to Turkey, where as recycled steel the palace was bought and used in the structure at the tip of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai (figure 3.10).120 On November 28, 2008, just as the last vestiges of the palace were being removed, the Italian architect Franco Stella won a juried competition to build the Humboldt Forum. His proposal was heavy with quotes from Italian architecture—a central corridor that evokes Florence’s Uffizi Palace Court, an eastern loggia facade in Italian rationalist style that raised criticisms of “fascist style” that harks back to the architects’ debate. The jury did not pick Stella with great enthusiasm but rather by default as the others were eliminated. There was no second prize, only third prizes. The lack of enthusiasm stemmed from the severe constraints placed upon the architects and the jury by the federal government to work within the shape and facades of the original. To make matters worse, the budget was capped at an unrealistic 552 million Euros, and any proposal that deviated from the instructions or exceeded the budget was disqualified. This amounted, as one member of the jury put it, to a “cap on all attempts at critical interpretation.”121 Accordingly, contradictions abound. The nineteenth-century en-suite room scheme of a baroque palace does not meet the needs of modern museums, and, in any case, the space is too small for the extensive and oversized collection of Asian art and artifacts, which include thirty-meter-tall Polynesian sailboats. The focus on the non-European other, its critics note, “reproduces the blind spot in the representation of the ‘Others,’ which is constitutive to the history of ethnographic politics of display.”122 Beyond the exhibit, the original allocation for the library was barely

FIGURE 3.10  Demolition of the Palace of the Republic. Steel beams removed from

the palace just before being loaded onto a barge for recycling. Some of the palace’s steel ended up in the Burg Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai. In the background the Television Tower. Berlin, 2008. Photo by author.

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sufficient for a reading room, much less Europe’s largest public library. In the end, what was initially championed as a democratic impulse— having the federal parliament vote openly on the reconstruction—became a “rigid straightjacket” that produced a “built political statement with all its limitations,” a pointed irony for a space that sought to overcome the legacy of state-directed architecture.123 Many obstacles and criticism notwithstanding, the Humboldt Forum became one of Berlin’s most anticipated new cultural institutions, though it remains a rich source for critique and parody.124 In the five years leading up to its opening in 2018, the castle became a new material reality for Berlin. In its shadow, a few oppositional associations persist, such as the Friends of the Palace that in 2016 held an exhibit to mark the fortieth anniversary of the palace’s opening, at which former GDR prime minister Hans Modrow reminisced about the palace’s “magnificent possibilities” and “its significance as a true people’s house [Volkshaus] in the GDR.”125 The architects and artists who created the Volkspalast moved on to more promising causes, such as the campaign to preserve the Tempelhof airfield. A small group of critics continue to question the logic of the castle and Humboldt Forum, such as No Castle in My Name or the loose academic network known as the Alexandertechnik, which organizes events to call attention to German colonialism and its contemporary legacies, or the tongue-in-cheek comedy of Marion Pfaus, who started a fund-raising campaign for the “unbuilding” of the castle in 2050, when, in good Hegelian fashion, the struggle for recognition reverses direction and the pendulum of history swings again (figure 3.11).126 In closing, we return to the lawn with which we began the chapter and that, for a few years, occupied the temporal gap between the palace and castle, forming an echo of the gap between the original castle and the palace, when the same vastness served as parade ground and parking lot. After the palace was dismantled, and before the castle construction began, the ruined landscape was turned suddenly into a pleasant green park with wooden footbridges that traced the perimeters of the two absent presences, each one running seamlessly into the other. “Visitors imagine

FIGURE 3.11  The Anti-Humboldt. Model at an event organized by the group Alex-

andertechnik at Humboldt University, Berlin. The image satirizes the Humboldt Forum’s plan to put the non-European collection of Berlin’s ethnographic museum in the rooms of the rebuilt castle, and imitates a well-known scale model mock-up of the planned reconstruction. July 11, 2009. Photo by author.

FIGURE 3.12  “The GDR Never Existed.” Anonymous graffito on a retaining wall on the site of the former Palace of the Republic. Berlin 2008. Photo by Arwed Messmer.

FIGURE 3.13  Lawn where the palace once stood. Park and wooden walkways as part

of temporary use of the palace site, designed by relais Landscape Architects, Berlin. The Television Tower is in the background. 2009. Photo by author.

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themselves on a construction site,” commented the Senate in its awarding the competition for this park to relais Landscape Architects, “without knowing what or whether anything will be built there at all.”127 Subtly shifting from the visual to the aural, the architects collaborated with artists to create “sound traces,” for which the artist Via Lewandowsky recorded hands clapping in ways evocative of the site’s history (horses, gunshots, marching, parades). This applause, he wrote, is not for anyone, but rather “can only be for absence.”128 One of the few traces of the palace was an anonymous graffito on a retaining wall in the southeast corner, left to fade slowly over the life of the park, proclaiming that the GDR had never existed (figures 3.12 and 3.13). The Humboldt Forum’s inauguration in 2018 decisively starts a new era for the site where the castle body stands anew in Berlin, still awaiting a fully finished facade. Yet, for a brief period between 2008 and 2012, the void between the two structures created a strangely serene openness. For a few years the signified, the idea of Berlin, lacked a signifier, whether palace or castle. For a while, there really was “nothing” at the end of Unter den Linden, as Siedler wrote in 1992. Perhaps this missing signifier, more than any attempt at its replacement, constitutes the inheritance of Berlin.

4 THE WALL AFTER THE WALL

E

mpirical questions about memory and materiality are embedded in questions about the relation of space and time: to be made visible as a symbol of time past, a site requires emplacement in a spatiotemporal relationship to the present. It must be de- and recoded, a process akin to Deleuze and Guatarri’s spatial metaphors of de- and reterritorialization.1 Their famous metaphors draw attention to the outsize role that the state and the forces that resist it play in shaping our modern encounters with historical memory. Perhaps, however, when speaking of memory sites, it would be useful to switch the spatial metaphor for a temporal one, and speak of de- and retemporalization. This chapter looks to the postunification trajectory of the Berlin Wall to see the workings of memory as “the guardian of the depth of time and of temporal distance,” in Paul Ricoeur’s felicitous phrase.2 Between November 9, 1989, when it was opened, and November 30, 1990, the official date of the wall’s full removal, the once nearly impenetrable border of eighty-five miles seemed to vanish in the blink of a historical eye. It had stood as the most infamous cold war border for twenty-six years, almost exactly the same amount of time it took to condense into a site of memory. This chapter explores how, over the course of a quarter century, one of the most politically potent borders in the world disappeared and reappeared as a site of different kinds of politics.3 It examines three key commemorative sites—the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse,

MAP 4.1  Berlin Wall and its main memory sites.

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Checkpoint Charlie, and the East Side Gallery, each of which initially emerged from bottom-up actions, only to find the state pushing back in the role of the keeper of national memory. In each site we see how the wall, once detemporalized, taken out of time, and consigned to an initially relatively minor presence in an otherwise burgeoning memorial landscape, came to be retemporalized and made available for appropriation in new, often antagonistic ways.

TIME FRAMES In the production of collective memory, temporality is at the forefront of this dance of decoding and recoding of space: memory sites play complex games with time by keeping the past visible and comprehensible in the present, curating narratives and conveying sentiments. Sites of memory are about framing time, the time frame, in German Zeitraum, or literally, time-space. Unlike space-time, which physicists use to refer to the fusion of time and three-dimensional space, time-space might be thought of as the dislocation and relocation of time and space necessary to creating the presence of the past in a particular location. This dis/relocation has a very specific purpose: to keep a particular place from being fully assimilated into the present and therefore unmarked as a site of memory. A memory site must be marked as such and kept visible despite change. Thus it must deploy temporality to fight the passage of time. Keeping a void empty yet pregnant with meaning requires skillfully avoiding Robert Musil’s ubiquitously invoked warning about the sly invisibility of monuments.4 A memory site must thus, paradoxically, be kept on the edge of vanishing and cultivate a productive tension that gathers around its fragile emptiness, as when physically frail ruins require conservation or memories are feared lost.5 We can call this the foreclosure of memory in both the sense of the prevention of its disappearance and its seizure by those who claim rightful ownership. However achieved, keeping space

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available to memory takes effort. It requires the labor of the negative (borrowing from Michael Taussig borrowing from Hegel) to capture a struggle with ambiguity as it oscillates between presence and absence.6 This labor is what produces a memory site, perhaps more accurately analyzed as an active siting. As the previous chapters have sought to show, neither disappearance nor reappearance happens on its own, but through acts of appropriation.

DETEMPORALIZATION While Berlin first struggled to overcome its division, it was not self-evident that the wall would assume a prominent role in Berlin’s crowded memory landscape. In the years following unification, the city began to grow together, with no plans for a federally funded wall memorial. The emphasis was squarely on the government’s own needs for restoring transportation and generating revenue by selling the land under which the Berlin Wall stood for commercial use. The unified city all but locked up the border land under its dominion: even former owners of the 750 lots expropriated by the Communist government to build the Berlin Wall had little legal claim for restoring their property.7 In 1992 the Berlin senate explicitly eschewed any plan to preserve the border, opting instead to support the “critical reconstruction” approach discussed in the last chapter, which looked to achieve unity by erasing and filling gaps.8 The first postunification Berlin land use plan in 1994 simply ignored the deadly demarcation altogether. Unclaimed for any large-scale official memorial practices, the wall’s spatial imprint was to be erased through new planning rather than acknowledged or incorporated into the landscape. As Carolyn Loeb put it, planners looked “through the Wall zone rather than directly at it” in order to envision the city as a whole.9 To ignore the wall in planning was one way of continuing to render harmless its recently fearsome power. Yet new construction was often delayed or blocked by property disputes. The result was not the seamless reincorporation of the

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border into the city, but large stretches of the former border left instead seemingly abandoned, its concrete vanished into a zigzag of mostly barren land, twisting through the city, awaiting development. With no claim to formal status as a memory site, the former border remained ripe for reappropriation by entrepreneurs, adventurers, squatters, and the city’s youth. Within the first summer seasons of united Berlin, thousands of mostly younger residents and tourists flocked to Caribbeanthemed “beaches” that sprung up in the former death strip along riverbank border areas. With sand brought in from the Baltic Sea and nearby Brandenburg, long rows of white beach chairs echoed strings of tank traps that once lined the death strip. These beaches inverted the logic of the border, making the formidable no-man’s-land accessible by setting it fully out of place—the tropics in the urban north. The “East Beach” (Oststrand ) advertised “4,500 square meters of white sand, palm trees across the premises, over 600 sun chairs.” More or less serendipitously, life began to fill the very places that only border guards and rabbits had access to for twenty-six years. During the decade after unification, as debates raged about building the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (located along the former wall on one of the large open spaces in the city’s center— the former death strip) and monuments and countermonuments proliferated across the city, the wall as memory site remained absent from official discourses.

RETURN TO SIGHT The wall returned to public discourse in the lead-up to the municipal elections of 2001, when a hard-fought campaign between the ruling conservatives and their left challengers coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the building of the wall on August 13, 1961. For the first time, the successor to the East German Communist Party, known then as the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism, today the Left Party), was about to play a key role in enabling the return of the Social Democrats to power after

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effectively twenty years (other than a short interruption). If the PDS could effectively shed the perceived mantle of responsibility for the wall and present themselves on the side of contemporary civil rights issues, it would open up new possibilities for forming a coalition with the Social Democrats in Berlin and perhaps someday even at a national level. The conservatives felt this danger acutely. Cursing politicians from the PDS, noted an observer, became its own ritualized form of politics.10 The effect was the introduction of the wall into the memory landscape of Berlin as part of a large-scale political instrumentalization of the wall in an election campaign. “Election in Berlin: So Many Topics to Discuss, and Everyone Is Arguing About the Wall” announced a headline in the daily Berliner Zeitung, noting, “By the way the parties are furiously duking it out, you would think Berlin’s future depends on talking about this past.”11 To the conservative’s dismay, the PDS did enter into coalition with the Social Democrats, won the election, and created the first “Red-Red” leftist elected government in Berlin. One result was a simmering symbolic war centered on the wall as a proxy for disparaging the left. The conservatives were eager to put the new government in an impossible situation and found the chance they were looking for when, in 2004, the controversial Freedom Monument (Freiheitsmahnmal) appeared at Checkpoint Charlie. It was erected by the Ukrainian artist Alexandra Hildebrandt, widow of Rainer Hildebrandt, founder of a famous, idiosyncratic, private museum devoted to the wall across from the checkpoint.12 Hildebrandt had leased a vacant lot on the former border site catercorner to the museum through the end of 2004, that had remained unbuilt despite ambitious plans (a typical result of the early 1990s land use planning for the wall).13 She had original segments of the wall trucked in from elsewhere, placed in a location where the wall itself had not run, and set in front of it 1,065 black crosses in a field of gravel (figure 4.1). The conservative Christian Democrats and victims associations embraced this “monument” passionately. Historians and preservationists balked, critiquing it as historically inaccurate, misleading, manipulative, as a shill for the museum and a contribution to the Disney-like atmosphere

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FIGURE 4.1  Black crosses at Checkpoint Charlie. Freedom Monument Scale Model in the Wall Museum showing the controversial project of 2004 by Alexandra Hildebrandt to commemorate the deaths of 1,065 people on the German border with black crosses at Checkpoint Charlie. 2009. Photo by author.

at the site.14 Those actually killed at the wall numbered around 200, depending on whether one includes suicides and border guards.15 Hildebrandt claimed the 1,065 crosses represented all victims of the communist regime. That they were not killed at the wall itself was beside the point, for, as she put it, “the Holocaust Memorial also doesn’t stand where the Holocaust took place.”16 When Hildebrandt described her project as a “counterpart” (her words) to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (aka the Holocaust Memorial, then just finishing construction), the 2,711 concrete stelae of the Holocaust Memorial were put in direct comparison with her 1,065 crosses a few city blocks away, both in former no-man’s-land.

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The city government felt compelled to disavow her memorial. In response, Hildebrandt drew attention to the fact that, as she put it, “there is nothing else” to commemorate the wall’s memory in an otherwise robust memory landscape. “She has a point there,” commented even the left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper that autumn of 2004, since “to this day the senators for urban development and culture lack an integrative and comprehensive concept for commemoration.”17 The lack of a memorial concept for the wall had been the result of over a decade of city government policy, most of it under the conservatives, and now the leftist coalition government found themselves in a politically delicate situation vis-à-vis the Freedom Monument, especially since the senator for cultural affairs, Thomas Flierl, represented the communist successor party. The situation came to a head when Hildebrandt refused to vacate the property after a failed attempt to extend her lease, and the Berlin government was legally obligated to forcibly clear the space to protect the owner’s property rights, even though there was no other immediate use in sight.18 The result, predictably, was a showdown, dampened by a persistent pouring rain, all through the night of July 3, 2005. The general secretary of the Berlin Christian Democrats, Frank Henkel, told the press that the CDU could not “stand by and silently accept this barbaric act of demolition, this clear cutting of crosses.”19 Into the night a couple of former East German prisoners chained themselves to crosses, a priest scattered holy water, tourists gawked, and the police closed the street, while victims associations, politicians, and representatives of the U.S. Republican Party Abroad protested until, shortly after daybreak on July 4, 2005 (a date the Republicans interpreted as an intentional affront), city workers in yellow rain jackets gingerly loaded the crosses into trucks and cleared the site.

THE CONCEPT Responding to this public relations fiasco, the city government presented its first ideas for a “comprehensive concept” for remembering the wall, six

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months after Hildebrandt’s attempted commemoration and sixteen years after reunification. The concept presented itself as a way for the city government to redeem the negative optics of Hildebrandt’s Freedom Monument, and it was carefully crafted under the conscientious stewardship of Flierl, together with the help of prominent academics, activists, and specialists. Its signature approach conceived of the wall as a distributed series of commemorative nodes that could be combined into a historical whole or encountered in singular modes of reflection. They could be read backward or forward, entered at any point by design or chance, and connected to pre- and postwall histories. Common signage (logos, fonts, color schemes, materials) would make them legible as a network, and Web sites would form a virtual accompaniment. The distributed memorial, in fact, mimicked more the design of a Web site than the Web site represented the memorial.20 Approved by the city with support from the federal government in 2006, the concept sought to integrate what had been a hodgepodge of wall remnants of differing visibility, condition, and significance.21 These included three primary sites associated with the wall (Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and Bernauer Strasse), six small ad hoc memorial sites for the victims (not counting Hildebrandt’s), two watchtowers, the former border control hall known as the Palace of Tears (then being used as a concert hall), a surviving stretch of wall known as the East Side Gallery, and its somber echo in the Niederkirchner Strasse, where a pockmarked stretch formed a ghostly double with the excavated foundations of the Gestapo headquarters directly below, preserved as part of the Topography of Terror exhibit site. These were the sum total of notable remnants from the wall. The concept also incorporated three significant green spaces, a cobblestone path tracing five kilometers of the wall through central Berlin, a city government-sponsored History Mile presenting historical information in all the languages of occupied Berlin, and an art project on the site of former border crossings (figure 4.2). To deal with this diversity, the concept broke the wall into its symbolic component parts, assigning memorial functions to specific sites. Bernauer

FIGURE 4.2  Cobblestone wall path. A double line of cobblestones stretching through central Berlin along the course of the former Berlin Wall. While small metal plaques set in the ground explain the meaning every so often, many people do not immediately understand what the stones represent. 2009. Photo by author.

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FIGURE 4.3  Berlin Wall History Trail Map. Map distributed by the Berlin Wall

Foundation showing the key commemorative sites. Checkpoint Charlie is not mentioned by name directly. Author’s collection.

Strasse was first among equals, highlighting the impact of the wall on the city of Berlin. The Brandenburg Gate, which the concept notes has “higher name recognition than La Scala in Milan or the Vatican,” highlights overcoming the division of Germany. Just beyond the rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, the remaining wall atop the Topography of Terror exhibit presents Berlin’s layers of history, especially the Nazi era. A few hundred meters further east, Checkpoint Charlie presents the wall in the context of global geopolitics and the cold war, while the East Side Gallery represents the street art legacy of the wall and freedom as artistic expression (figure 4.3). Embedded within this necklace of the wall are secondary sites, such as guard towers or individual memorials, visible mostly to those following maps, apps, or guides. Two supplemental sites break with the wall’s trajectory itself: the Palace of Tears, since 2011 a museum run by the federal

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government-supported House of History Foundation based in Bonn, showcasing the division of Germany, and the former processing center for Eastern refugees in the Marienfelde district. Finally, an outer ring of related sites consists of the Ministry for State Security headquarters and prison, museums devoted to the Western allies and to German-Russian history, and other crossings and watchtowers. The Berlin Wall Foundation, founded in 2008, only exerted direct control over Bernauer Strasse and Marienfelde, adding the East Side Gallery in 2013. The concept, then, sought to integrate a variety of sites under various forms of private and public ownership into one comprehensive memorial network.22 The concept aligned the temporality of the former wall spaces with their growing visibility. “It is beyond question,” read the original charge, “that the current piecemeal memory landscape in its uncontrolled growth cannot over time appropriately satisfy the public interest for reflective remembrance.”23 Thus the concept seeks to shift the temporality of “reflective remembrance” and embed it within controlled growth. Three key sites in particular within its discursive jurisdiction—Bernauer Strasse, Checkpoint Charlie, and the East Side Gallery—form three types of retemporalization into the contemporary city as sites of commemorative memory, and it is to these we now turn.

THE BERLIN WALL MEMORIAL AT BERNAUER STRASSE AND THE TEMPORALITY OF TRAUMA Bernauer Strasse was not an international household name during the cold war as were the Brandenburg Gate or Checkpoint Charlie, with their political and popular cultural roles, yet it formed the location for iconic images such as a border guard defecting by leaping over barbed wire, people jumping from windows to the West, and the dramatic 1985 demolition of the Church of Reconciliation to expand the death strip. As the rare remaining space that demonstrated the full depth of the wall beyond its

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Western facade, this segment lent itself to a larger-scale memorial than anywhere else. It benefited from years of activism, careful planning, and outreach and consequently established itself as the central site for ritual commemoration of the wall’s building, as a repository for material and archival preservation, and as a space for personal encounter. Its form and aura are greatly influenced by the ethos of its most fervent advocate, the late pastor Martin Fischer, and the site’s director, Axel Klausmeier, an art historian who, with Leo Schmidt, exhaustively surveyed the wall’s traces and had written a dissertation on eighteenth-century English architecture. Massive in size and scope, it nonetheless seeks to be humble and eschew monumental gestures. Bernauer Strasse is itself a monument to the challenges of monumentalization. With the hushed aura of a sacred space, it has become a national keeper of traumatic cold war memory. As with any site of material heritage, the challenge is to maintain its essence despite its existence in a different time from the one in which it made sense. For Klausmeier, this means strict adherence to authenticity: authenticity is fragile and inexorably linked to trust: “With the dictum ‘no reconstruction’ ” he writes, “we avoid any breaking of the visitor’s trust in the authenticity of the place. Should the material witness [Zeugnis] prove to be a fake, this would destroy the credibility of the entire place and put in question the truth of the place and the truth of its history.”24 Authenticity, however, must be consciously produced, for as Aleida Assmann notes, “the conservation of [a] historical site in the service of authenticity unavoidably results in a loss of authenticity.”25 Thus “no reconstruction” does not mean leaving the site to decay. Quite the opposite, it means original remnants and remains are highlighted, preserved, and supplemented. The decisive aspect of authenticity is not material fidelity but what that fidelity indexes: as Klausmeier put it, “the truth of the place and the truth of its history.” For Bernauer Strasse, authenticity is achieved through the logic of the countermonument, bringing together the two forms of emptiness particular to Berlin that Andreas Huyssen has explored: urban voids created by historical circumstance (war, division) and architectural voids created as aesthetic interventions into the

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echo of this emptiness.26 Into this double void Bernauer Strasse presents many different versions of the wall all at once—as ruin, abstract representation, hulking realist restoration, subtle archaeological trace, spaces between buildings—thereby making any one version unable to “relieve viewers of their memory burden,” as James Young once put it.27 Despite realist elements, as a whole the effect is of a countermonument engaging and prodding the viewer’s personal relationship to the events being commemorated regardless of the visitor’s age, provenance, or politics. Like all countermonuments, this one is deeply concerned with the convergence of sight and site, with making hidden pasts visible while sustaining its own visibility. To do this, the memorial uses the underlying narrative of trauma—of division, separation, death, intimidation, and helplessness—to create a 1.3-kilometer-long course that connects the visitor’s body with various strategically placed remnants, objects, images, and exhibits. Through its design, it creates the spatial equivalent of the temporality of trauma, in Cathy Caruth’s sense, as the gap between the original event (however defined) and the moment of its remembrance.28 When architecture attempts to capture this temporality of trauma, it privileges an uncanny, nonredemptive form that turns the invisible into something sensate and material. As with Daniel Libeskind’s voids and Holocaust Tower in Berlin’s Jewish Museum, the wall memorial produces an emptiness that cannot be filled, a space that cannot be fully located, a fact with no simple interpretation. It uses the urban emptiness of the death strip as its architectural space, supplementing it with subtly symbolic, nonredemptive structures and markers sheathed in identical deep-rust-colored Corten steel, a weather resistant, oxidized metal. This design provides direct aesthetic links to Berlin’s other great countermonumental sites of memory (Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) while seeking neither equivalence nor competition. Rather, it extends and supplements their aura, becoming part of a global architecture of trauma, which, as Roann Barris, notes, “does not represent the traumatic narrative. Instead, it creates that uncanny moment of knowing what one does not know or

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want to know. Neither symbolic nor hermetic, these . . . spaces . . . evoke patterns of movement, thought and feeling without producing or relying on the visitor’s memory or direct, personal experience of trauma.”29 Upon approach from its western edge, the visitor comes across an empty parklike expanse out of which the wall materializes, as if in a timelapse photograph. Individual steel rods rise from a grassy open space, spaced far enough apart to walk through but forming a solid wall of rust when viewed from an angle. The rusty steel rods fade into the ruin of the wall itself, preserved in its early postunification state of decay: chipped, eroded, spray painted, exposed, toothless, whole panels missing. In turn, this ruined wall becomes The Wall as it once stood. This memorial centerpiece (Gedenkstätte) is a seventy-meter stretch including the depth of the border. Built by the architects Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff, it aims to stimulate the imagination: no one is allowed into the former death strip, with its raked control strip, patrol road, watch tower, lights, and smaller interior wall intact.30 This section alone is designated a national monument (nationale Denkmal). A viewing platform across the street gives a bird’seye view of the border, adding a powerful dimension (and greatly increasing visitor traffic). Once past this full-scale remnant, the wall again fades into rusty rods before giving way entirely to bushes and trees. The memorial was unable to fully acquire the property for this last tract, and the wall’s space becomes gradually punctuated by sleek new houses, a temporary circus, a parking lot, empty lots and construction sites, before culminating in the bustling flea markets and food stalls of the trendy Mauerpark, a favorite green space for young Berliners and tourists along the former death strip. Flanking the national monument, two supplemental memorials draw attention to the human and spatial specificity of the wall: the “window of remembrance” gives faces to the victims who died at the wall through photographs, simultaneously highlighting their previous invisibility through missing photographs of largely unknown victims, becoming an effective equivalent of the tomb of the unknown soldier for a deadly side of the cold war, while an adjacent stone block lists the names of border

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soldiers who died on duty. This “window” is the site for the August 13, 1961, anniversary ceremonies, functioning as a location of national mourning for the human cost of the division. On the national monument’s other side, the oval postmodern Chapel of Reconciliation (designed by Peter Sassenroth and Rudolf Reitermann and built by Martin Rauch) stands in the middle of a miniature field of gently rippling rye, warm light coming through its wooden slats like an inviting lamp. This gentle abstract shape sits where the East German government blew up a church to expand the border’s death strip. While services are held there, it is neither exactly a reconstruction nor solely a memorial, rather its spiral-shaped entry is almost like a meditation path. It marks the space without reclaiming it. Deep within the chapel, an inert American bomb from World War II is visible as if at the bottom of a well (figures 4.4–4.6).

FIGURE 4.4  Steel rods marking the Berlin Wall. Corten steel rods at the Bernauer

Strasse Memorial. Berlin. 2014. Photo by author.

FIGURE 4.5  Berlin Wall National Monument. This is the only still existing wall (restored) showing its full depth and both the outer (western facing) and inner (eastern facing) walls. Part of the Berlin Wall Memorial. 2012. Photo by author.

FIGURE 4.6  Chapel of Reconciliation. Chapel erected on the site of the former Church of Reconciliation, demolished by the East German government to expand the wall at Bernauer Strasse. 2014. Photo by author.

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THE CHECKPOINT CHARLIE EXPERIENCE Bernauer Strasse is organized around the temporality of trauma—the interval between the original event and its re-membering through the production of an “authentic” landscape of encounter. In contrast, Checkpoint Charlie is organized around a second type of temporality: the interval between the erasure of the original space and its repurposing. Rather than primarily a space of trauma, it becomes a space of anticipation, always waiting for something to happen. During the cold war, Soviet and American tanks famously faced each other in 1961. After reunification, the space remained empty not because civil society groups sought to protect it from development, as with Bernauer Strasse, but because ambitious real estate deals to build an “American business center” (among other things) encountered bankruptcy, debt, and foreclosure, leaving the site perpetually in a state of becoming.31 Left empty by default rather than design, Checkpoint Charlie became a site of both recreation and re-creation. The federal cultural affairs committee chairwoman Monika Grüters feared that Germany was “ceding this historical site to itself ” by allowing it to be an unregulated site of memory, echoing criticism that the space has become “unworthy,” “carnival,” and “squalid” because of the seemingly unseemly fun to be had there.32 Leaving places to themselves, she implies, does not produce authenticity, rather, a place must be professionally produced, as with Bernauer Strasse, because authenticity exists not in being yourself but in putting work into finding yourself. This is, in a sense, a labor theory of authenticity, where labor produces truth. To “cede” a place to its own devices endangers authenticity and the trust it inspires, which, in turn (following Klausmeier), risks destroying credibility and questioning truth. In Bernauer Strasse, the production of authenticity makes the space coeval with trauma, separating the event and its remembering, slowing down time and encouraging reflection. People don’t hurry through the Bernauer Strasse Memorial any more than they run through a cathedral. The very design, with multiple markers that you literally stumble upon,

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slows you down, as does the human reflex to pause at sites of death or ritual mourning. Checkpoint Charlie, on the other hand, eliminates the gap between the event and its remembering, speeding up time by turning its remembering into a contemporary experience through which you rush, trying to make sure you at least glimpse each corner briefly. There is little “authentic” at Checkpoint Charlie in a preservationist’s sense of the term. Arguably the most visible authentic remnant is Rainer Hildebrandt’s wall museum itself, with its quirky display of escape attempts and, according to its critics, “confusingly arranged, poorly curated and ideologically exaggerated” exhibits.33 Most everything else is “false”: the iconic U.S. guardhouse, complete with sandbags, and the “Leaving the American Sector” sign are replicas, the huge pop art paintings across the street are recent creations by international artists on wall segments from other parts of the wall, and the military regalia and ubiquitous small wall pieces sold as souvenirs are untraceable and widely considered fake. The American and Soviet soldiers in front of the guardhouse replica are, of course, actors (often students and, famously, at one point, strippers), who pose for photos for money (figure 4.7). Surrounding these iconic impersonations are food stalls (from Turkish to Japanese), “Charlie’s Beach” beckoning with tropical palms, sand, and lounge chairs festooned with advertisements for Lucky Strike, Coca-Cola, and Corona beer. Above, on the exposed wall of a building, a huge advertisement in four languages reads, with unintended ironic commentary: “You are Now Entering the Nonprofit Sector.”34 This concentrated and carnivalesque scene is the id to Bernauer Strasse’s pristine and spacious superego. This is evident in the choice of dominant images that watch over both scenes. In Bernauer Strasse, massive black and white photographic blow-ups are imprinted four or five stories high along the exposed walls of adjacent buildings. They show an East German guard in mid-jump defecting to the West, a bystander watching workmen build the wall, families escaping from bricked-up buildings, the long, empty expanse of the wall in its heyday. At Checkpoint Charlie, portraits of American and Russian soldiers, photographed in 1994, look down in full color from

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FIGURE 4.7  Fake soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie. Tourists posing for photos with actors in military uniform at the reproduction of the U.S. Army Checkpoint Charlie. Berlin, 2014. Photo by author.

oversize light boxes. The artist Frank Thiel chose the light box because it is an advertising medium; he saw them “in dialogue—as secret accomplices and, probably, as competitors—with all the other light boxes in the city” and anticipated their conflation with actual advertisements.35 After the advent of the concept, the Berlin government sought to counter the commercialism by entering into a partnership with the civic organization Berlin Forum for Past and Present to create temporary exhibits at the site. But to compete with the actors and hawkers, even the provisional attempts at decorum have an entertaining feel. Along a temporary wall a timeline exhibit draws clumps of readers, giving the feel of an era when people gathered to read newspapers posted in public. In anticipation of a future cold war museum, the Forum’s pop-up exhibit called Black Box Cold War occupies a black one-story makeshift structure on a former section of Charlie’s Beach, surrounded by sand and boasting

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FIGURE 4.8  Tourists posing with Berlin Wall segment. Wall remnants placed in the

shape of an arch in front of the Black Box Cold War exhibit, a privately run temporary exhibit on the grounds of Checkpoint Charlie. The wall pieces are not in their original location and do not represent the actual configuration of the checkpoint. 2014. Photo by author.

a Stonehenge-style gate made out of wall segments under which tourists stand for pictures (figure 4.8). It is the only city-run memorial site that charges admission. Large white and gray capital letters in four languages (most prominently English) shout cold war keywords from its facade: “Nuclear Weapons,” “Espionage,” “Iron Curtain,” and, in the largest letters of all, “THE WALL.” Inside, an aesthetically sophisticated, visually attractive multimedia exhibit embeds the wall’s chronology in larger international context, ending with a jarring blow-up of a plane exploding inside New York’s World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks of 2001. At one corner of this image, an almost invisible frame suspends three small relics from the present: two patches from the German Bundeswehr contingent assigned to NATO forces in Afghanistan, and a pocket-size military language guide for Dari.

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The nearby caption notes that, although the cold war is over, “the consequences of the decades-long arms race and the destabilization experienced in diverse crisis regions are quite a burdensome heritage for the world community to bear.” A similar black box sits across Friedrichstrasse behind vendors and food stalls, housing another long-term temporary exhibit: an extraordinary panorama by the Berlin artist Yadegar Asisi. In a darkened chamber, visitors climb to an industrial platform large enough to hold two hundred people and gaze out at a stunning panorama of the wall as seen in 1987 from the Western side where the artist once lived. With painstaking images of everyday life in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, Asisi’s panorama indirectly invokes the neighborhood’s Turkish immigrant life in the shadow of the wall, subtly provoking the viewer to reflect on the general absence of migration in what is predominantly presented as a GermanGerman story. Introducing migrant narratives into the wall memorial landscape is a rare occurrence in the wall’s memorial sites, as it forces, as Jeffrey Jurgens observes about the memorialization of a Turkish child who died at the wall, a questioning of the “collective affiliations that public memories of the Berlin Wall both underwrite and foreclose.”36 At almost two hundred feet wide by fifty feet tall, Asisi’s achingly detailed panorama pulls you into the picture. Time is frozen and accelerated: Every twenty minutes the lights fade from sunrise to deep night— you stand there transfixed while day and night cycle by, watching the uncannily lifelike figures, immobile in mid-movement. The panorama building sports a large billboard in English barking “The Berlin WALL: See it Here” (figure 4.9). On the other side a promotional quote in large letters seems to reject Klausmeier’s injunction against reconstruction: “BRINGING THE BERLIN WALL BACK TO LIFE” reads white letters on a black wall, and inside the promise is amazingly, seductively, magically fulfilled. Thus, if Bernauer Strasse redeems the past by making it nonredemptive, Checkpoint Charlie redeems the past by making it legible in the language of today’s politics and market culture. The visitor is the consumer who, in turn, produces the space through consumption: the tourist’s

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FIGURE 4.9  See the wall here! Advertisement for the Berlin Wall Panorama, an immersive full-scale artwork, by Yadegar Asisi, Checkpoint Charlie. Berlin, 2014. Photo by author.

photos with the soldiers, the souvenirs of the wall, the invitation at the Asisi panorama for visitors to write their own stories on a wall and to post their own photographic memories via e-mail. Most of these exhibits and stands are, at least formally, temporary. Checkpoint Charlie is, literally, a con-temporary monument, living and evolving together with the times.

POLITICS OF OCCUPATION: THE EAST SIDE GALLERY Taken together, Bernauer Strasse and Checkpoint Charlie work as binary opposites in a memorial landscape that navigates between solemn responsibility and place marketing. They are, however, also set against a third space, the East Side Gallery, literally a third location in the city where wall tourists flock to see colorful art and a third space in Edward

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Soja’s sense where history, sociality, and space intersect to produce unusual encounters.37 Lost on many tourists is that its painted origin lies not in the cold war but in the unification era. Compared with the other sites, the East Side Gallery site lacks historical distinction before 1989 other than the quirk that the road to East Berlin’s airport ran alongside it. This otherwise banal fact had one interesting effect: in order to hide the rawness of the border from visiting dignitaries, the government replaced the usual fence on the Eastern side of the wall with the smooth fourth-generation Western facade (“Border Wall 75”) whose white surface had, in the 1980s, provided an irresistible canvas for artists in the West. Immediately after the border opened, with the GDR state still intact, a man named Manfred Butzmann painted rabbits as a symbol of freedom on this wall (rabbits could pass usually unharmed through the death strip). When antiwall graffiti appeared next to the pictures, both were painted over by the border guards. The East German government quickly contracted with an advertising company for billboards to provide revenue (a logical use for an expanse of white wall along a busy avenue), yet they were soon convinced that there was a better scheme. They were already preserving and starting to sell the most valuable pieces of wall art to earn hard currency, so when a young Scottish woman working for the British Council in East Berlin sought to secure the site for fresh wall painting, they saw it as an opportunity for continued production of a suddenly valuable commodity. The arrangement envisioned the eventual auctioning of the new art along with a world tour to drive up the price.38 Tour and auction ideas faded along with the GDR, but that stretch of wall embodied the spirit of defiance, jubilation, and optimism that characterized the period, as 118 artists, large and small, converged from 21 countries for 8 months to paint over 100 segments as the GDR unraveled. Protected by the aura of the paintings, it became the face of the unification year, acquiring heritage status almost immediately in 1991, and exists into the present as a 1.3 kilometer-long “visual testimony of the joy and spirit of liberation” known formally as the International Memorial to Freedom (figures 4.10 and 4.11).39

FIGURE 4.10  East Side Gallery in 1990. Artists from around the world were invited to paint murals on a clean white stretch of the Berlin Wall on its Eastern-facing side. 1990. Photo by author.

FIGURE 4.11  East Side Gallery in 2009. The stretch of wall paintings received heritage protection and became a major tourist destination in postunification Berlin. 2009. Photo by author.

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While the rest of the Western-facing wall was being chipped away and sold, this stretch emerged as contemporary commentary in 1990: here defacement was still a form of iconoclasm; elsewhere it took the form of physical destruction. This space was spared the wall-peckers, since to take hammer and chisel to these paintings-in-progress seemed to cancel out its power as a form of unmasking the wall. In this way the East Side Gallery used defacement to shift the wall “from an excess of invisibility to an excess of visibility,” as Taussig has written about the defacement of monuments.40 Both the act and the art were a transgression against norms: at first against the wall’s sacredness, and then as “street art” with provocative messages of peace and love such as the famous Star of David superimposed over the German flag or the homoerotic kiss between Gorbachev and then GDR leader Honecker. But there was another interplay of excess and invisibility happening: behind the East Side Gallery’s tourist-friendly (defaced) face, in the former death strip, a trailer encampment of squatters “had taken up residence on the Spree in an apocalyptic village surrounded on all sides by rubbish, like a prison encircled by barbed wire.”41 The trailers were mostly of the old-fashioned circus-wagon variety, the inhabitants part of a larger community of mobile squatters who lived in Wagenburgs (wagon fortresses) and pursued a more or less communal, alternative lifestyle in opposition to the social failings of both East and West (figure 4.12). The former border provided a perfectly metaphoric and briefly uncontrolled liminal space for this. The encampment became emblematic of uncontrollable nomadic flows that threatened the solidification of a unifying city during its own liminal period between the end of the GDR and taking up its formal role as united Germany’s government seat.42 This liminal space inspired fear of an Otherspace (also a characteristic of third spaces) as chaotic and dangerous, as in this 1996 description from the national weekly Der Spiegel: Behind the multicolored wall and removed from the tourist gaze, an ever increasing number of metropolitan nomads are stranded on a small strip of shore along the Spree River. By now the East Side has over 200 inhabitants living in discarded buses, wooden huts, or caravans. Hundreds of scrapped

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FIGURE 4.12  Encampment in Potsdamer Platz 1990. A squatter tent city in Potsdamer Platz in the liminal space of the former border zone. 1990. Photo by author.

cars are rusting next to armored personnel carriers and trucks from the NVA [the East German military], burned-out limousines or shattered Trabis. Refuse swells up from overfilled trash bags. Half-wild dogs, some as large as ponies, roam yapping between the mountains of bottles and shopping carts. It stinks of excrement, rotten potatoes, and burned plastic—a piece of the third world has established itself in the center of the budding metropolis.43

The metropolitan nomads establishing the “third world” in the center of the city were both invisible as subjects of the city and too visible as “rabble” (Gesindel ), as a politician called the residents.44 In 1996 the city banned and cleared all wagon settlements by force, and the death strip by the East Side Gallery settled into a long phase of use as a recreational space, eventually functioning as a de facto park attached to the East Side Gallery, across from a new concert and sports venue and connected to the

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tourist circuit by boat. As this infrastructure progressed, so did plans for private development as part of a sorely contested creative industry cluster under the umbrella name Media Spree. The East Side Gallery became increasingly professionalized, with plans for a museum, preservation of the wall, and a controversial “renovation” of fading paintings through repainting without the expressed permission of all the artists, an act that again raised the question of the differential value of authenticity. Despite the increasingly sacral nature of the paintings, the site continued to bear the traces of the alternative urban spirit nurtured under the shadow of the wall in the western district of Kreuzberg and, after unification, in the adjacent eastern Friedrichshain district. With the municipal merger of these two districts in 2001, the East Side Gallery became the center, rather than the border, of one of the most politically left neighborhoods in Berlin. In 2011 over 83.1 percent of the vote for district council went to left parties, dominated by the Greens.45 In the midst of heated battles about the preservation and future of the East Side Gallery, Klausmeier noted drily that the district “is like a little Gallic village in Asterix, a green fleck within a red-black senate, and the Gallic village is playing with the Romans.”46 This combination of legacy and left politics allowed the East Side Gallery to become metonymically linked with antigentrification sentiment in Berlin.47 In 2013 a builder began to move a section of the East Side Gallery to create access to a luxury tower, named Living Levels under construction in the former death strip (figure 4.13). The Ex-Berliner newspaper reported the news as a story of predatory neoliberalism: You wake up one morning and find yourself in a scary, alternate-reality version of Berlin: monster bulldozers, alien buildings, blood-sucking investors and zombie politicians. A city where the East Side Gallery, the last intact stretch of the Berlin Wall, sits sandwiched between a Daimler office tower and luxury condos. Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Last month, the whole world was stunned to hear that the remains of the Berlin Wall, now an art gallery, were being tossed aside to make way for an exclusive apartment tower: the once-terrifying symbol of communist oppression laid low by a monument to capitalist greed.48

FIGURE 4.13  Luxury apartment building Living Levels rising above the East Side

Gallery. The building was highly controversial because it was seen as endangering both the physical integrity and spirit of the East Side Gallery. It came to symbolize gentrification in Berlin. 2014. Photo by author.

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Protecting the East Side Gallery thus became itself a transgressive act against the “blood-sucking investors and zombie politicians.” This entailed an ironic inversion, turning the 1989 slogan “The wall must go!” into the 2013 slogan “The wall must stay!” When Alexandra Hildebrandt’s crosses at Checkpoint Charlie were removed, the protestors were mostly conservative politicians and former political prisoners. Nearly a decade later, at the East Side Gallery, creative, alternative, left-leaning Berlin turned out en masse. Artists covered the wall with white paper to hide the sacred artwork, acting on the anthropologically sound impulse that hiding a sacred object would increase its power. International television and rock stars, from David Hasselhof to Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, made appearances. The methods of public protest reflected these changing audiences: in 1990 Pastor Martin Fischer stood in front of bulldozers to protect the section of wall in Bernauer Strasse; in 2005 former prisoners chained themselves to Hildebrandt’s crosses at Checkpoint Charlie; in 2013 leather fashion designer Daniel Rodan, who designed a “wall clothing” (Mauerkleidung) series, brought his models, each “wearing the wall,” for a photo shoot to protest, with a large banner reading, in English, “don’t touch the Eastside Gallery.” One of the characteristics of third spaces is the difficulty of drawing clear lines. The protesters were no longer the “others” of the caravan settlements, but the creative population essential to Berlin’s early-twentyfirst-century “poor but sexy” brand (the city’s inadvertent motto coined by Mayor Klaus Wowereit in 2003). They occupied a space both radical and conservative at the same time, spurring change and resisting it. The Living Levels luxury apartment tower played directly on this tension in its advertising: “Let’s stop limiting our lives. Let’s push things forward.” The motto of the parent firm, Living Bauhaus, is a similarly situated pun: “Live in the center of it all” (“Leben Sie ruhig mittendrin”). The German phrase plays both on the firm’s focus on central Berlin (Mitte) and its juxtaposition of quiet living in an urban setting (mittendrin). Thus the protesters blur with potential consumers, the political polarities are inverted, and even the developer himself, the much-pilloried Maik Uwe Hinkel,

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turns out to be a bundle of historical contradictions, having once informed for the Ministry for State Security in the former East Germany.49 Thus, while on the surface the battle over preserving the East Side Gallery pitted citizens against developers, it can also be read as a moment when two forms of state consolidation merged: the desire to expose and erase the wall by bringing it into the time of the city as regular lots for development, and the desire to control through heritage and preservation, following international best practices and the privileging of authenticity to help accompany memory in the service of society. Both, ultimately, met at the East Side Gallery. Seeking to dampen the criticism raised by Living Levels, the Berlin senate voted in mid-December 2013 to formally add the East Side Gallery to the Berlin Wall Foundation’s official sites, giving them direct administration over the stretch of wall, though with inadequate resources. At the same time, Living Levels was allowed to proceed.50 After 1989 one cannot talk about the Berlin Wall as a single site. The Berlin senate’s concept that brought the wall back to sight as a coherent focus of state commemoration was both savvy and pragmatic in recognizing that the wall could only be reabsorbed under state control as an assemblage. In effect, they had to transform the wall from a boundary into what scholars of science and technology call a boundary object: a physical object, like a map, that can both adjust to needs of multiple constituencies and retain a common identity, allowing for a form of uncoerced coordination.51 In a more literary sense, the concept in its original German— Gesamtkonzept or comprehensive concept—carries cadences of the claim to totality, as in the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The concept is, in its own way, a work of art as the wall becomes both material substance and concept to be viewed from different angles, in different lights, a mixture of performance piece and scripted play. It is totalizing in its claim to absorb all the various extant representations of the wall, even if they are not formally part of the envisioned institutional arrangement: some former wall sites belong to the Berlin Wall Memorial Foundation, others are

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privately run, but the cross-referencing of sites in the various plans, maps, and virtual guides pulls them together discursively into the same field. For the first decade after reunification, the wall had been detemporalized as the former death strip became available for informal use for renegade memorials, private initiatives to commemorate the dead, beach parties and other leisure desires that played out along its mostly vacant stretches. In the second decade up to the present, the wall was retemporalized by the concept, elevating the three sites we examined by dint of their exclusive association with the wall.52 The concept did not make the sites visible in their own right, but took their respective rhythms and temporalities and set them more explicitly in relation to each other. The three temporalities of the key wall sites explored here correspond loosely to the temporalities of trauma, consumption, and the political. These are not discrete but relational: not competing “fault lines” across which different approaches to preservation and commemoration take sides, but rather, literally as well as figuratively, multidirectional sites, to use Michael Rothberg’s term.53 As relational, multidirectional nodes, each site connects what we may call Berlin’s memory economy—the circulation of redemptive practices that anchors Berlin’s desired reputation for dealing responsibly with past injustice—with other circuits, without which the memory economy would stagnate, for all economies need to circulate: Bernauer Strasse connects to the global countermonumental architecture of trauma, from Berlin to Buenos Aires to New York’s 9/11 memorial.54 Checkpoint Charlie connects to the global experience economy, linking consumption to experience and turning the memory of the experience into the product.55 The East Side Gallery becomes a site for the political tensions inherent in the city’s championing of the creative economy as the anchor of its postindustrial present.56 Together, these sites connect the city not to its past as much as its search for new frontiers of the possible. Through its appropriation as a site of commemoration, commerce, and creative economy, the wall is brought into the time of now, in the contradictory sense of the present

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and as the “now time” of Walter Benjamin in which time stands poised to move into new, revolutionary, eras.57 This temporal multidirectionality, of simultaneously framing the past, presenting the contemporary, and channeling pent-up energy for a different future, is not static but rather something in motion. The role of the wall after the wall bears resemblance to Deleuze and Guatarri’s idea of the nomad as a creatively aggressive agent of unfinished business, harbinger of unruly heterogeneity and fluid sets of relations: reterritorialization contains the seeds of the next cycle of deterritorialization.58 Despite its neat presentation in the city’s concept, the wall after the wall contains active traces in its appropriations: the unfinished political tensions that prompted the concept in the first place; the unfinishable process of memorializing trauma in Berlin and Germany; the seductive power of consumption and its various resistances, from conservative condemnation of Checkpoint Charlie’s consumerism to radical opposition to gentrification along the East Side Gallery. The wall stood for twenty-six years. Twenty-six years after its “fall,” it had not so much disappeared as found a way to remain both margin and center at the same time.

EPILOGUE Exit Ghost

Entscheidend ist, dass endlich die Sprachlosen sprechen und die Steine reden. Decisive is, that finally the speechless speak and the stones talk. —Heiner Müller

F

rom the Intershop that began chapter 1 to the Berlin Wall memorials that concluded chapter 4, this book has paid special attention to things out of place and places out of time. Over the quarter century covered in this book, the questions have shifted since a crudely handwritten “We Sell East Products” sign caught my eye taped to a grocery store window in Erfurt in the early days after unification. Today, questions about nostalgia, authenticity, complicity, and everyday life take new forms when posed not by the generation whose formative years were in cold war Germanies but by their children, the generation who came of age after unification. All societies carry out unavoidable negotiations between multiple, overlapping, and contradictory pasts through the mechanism of inheritance. Inheritance is a specifically intergenerational task that links the past to the future through the practice of appropriation—the making of what was once someone else’s into mine/yours.1 This entails both an inherent

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ambiguity (disputes over inheritances are legendary) and the unavoidable production of a surplus, the excess left over from the temporal and spatial discrepancy between what once belonged to someone else and now is yours to spend, as Bataille might say, gloriously or catastrophically.2 Appropriation becomes the means by which this excess is extracted in order to create new value, whether financial, moral, symbolic, or what we have identified as memory value. Through appropriation, inherited remains appear not as emissaries from another time but as active participants in our forging the future. This is why appropriation, taking various forms, has run like a thread throughout these chapters. Sometimes, as with the consumer objects in the first chapter, it is the market that aids in appropriation, perhaps counterintuitively, by commodifying a formerly valueless object, retrieving it from a certain cultural invisibility via nostalgia, and reinserting it into mainstream culture where it circulates under a new verisimilitude.3 At others, as with the museums of everyday life under socialism, appropriation takes the form of reasserting ownership over suddenly culturally obsolete objects that, to function as anamnestic objects, have to be revalued by asserting authenticity through tactics of tactility and visuality. Yet it is in the appropriation of the Palace of the Republic that we first clearly see the generational shift, when the younger artists and architects of the Volkspalast used material inheritance to disrupt the binary discourses of East and West frozen in place over the site. Their transgressive use of the palace’s ruins contains productive contradictions, for it is linked to the new creative and cultural economy that has controversially remade Berlin’s cityscape, including the memorial landscape of the Berlin Wall, as we saw in the last chapter. The market, which was both feared and fetishized in the early days of unification, reappears by the end of the book as an even greater site of ambiguity for a younger generation who themselves are often “creative” but for whom the terms neoliberalism, gentrification, and globalization have come to frame the contemporary critique of society.

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UNSETTLED OBJECTS The challenge of inheriting the socialist past falls most directly to those from the former East who came of age after unification. They face a double bind similar to what Eric Santner described following the end of the Second World War: the need to both identify with and disavow the past.4 That the postunification narrative of the GDR is one of a state succumbing to its internal contradictions followed by incorporation into the West, rather than the post–National Socialist narrative of absolute evil and spectacular catastrophe leading to a mythical year zero, makes the task of identification and disavowal more diffuse but no less present. For those born shortly before or after unification, the loss of the GDR is not equivalent to the elegiac inheritance that navigates between mourning and melancholia. Rather, like the second generation after the war, whose parents, as Santner notes, “were, psychologically speaking, always elsewhere,” they also feel less like something is lost and more like something is missing.5 But unlike the advocates for the construction of the missing castle, which in its specificity became the focus of a mythic inheritance, or those seeking to “properly” commemorate the Berlin Wall, what is missing is not so easily cathected onto a particular object. Instead, the unsettled object is Germany itself. While at one level discomforting, keeping the past, and therefore the present, unsettled allows for new connections between seemingly discrete pasts and a complex present in which the politics of memory must be multidirectional if it is to avoid the trap of competition and escape oscillation between the terms of the double bind.6 Thus I want to give the last word in this book to this generation, in their voice, through a literal example of performative inheritance by which the past is appropriated in complex ways. It revolves around Hamlet, a figure who looms large in the postwar grappling with the National Socialist past, both as a symbol of “blocked mourning” and, in the East German playwright Heiner Müller’s Hamlet Machine, as evocative of a special German fatal dithering, an inability to carry out democratic revolutions.7 The play, and Müller himself, had a cameo role in the events of 1989. Written

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in 1977, the play had, unsurprisingly, been banned in the GDR—after all, the script contains scenes of Marx, Lenin, and Mao as naked women having their heads cleaved by Hamlet’s sword. The increasing pressure for change in early 1989 convinced the then East German government to allow an East Berlin performance, and rehearsals commenced that fateful fall. When rehearsals started, of course, no one could foresee that the government would fold so quickly, that the borders would be opened, or that the country would collapse and become part of the Federal Republic. The impact of the play on East German society would have been completely different if it was performed under the “normal” circumstances of the old regime.8 Writing of Müller’s reference in an earlier production to the line “Hamlet is Germany” from an 1844 poem, David Barnett suggests that the play is originally about “the GDR’s inability and unwillingness to reform itself, or perhaps more correctly, to carry through the revolution it was supposed to represent.”9 The revolution came differently, however, and the events of 1989 are now celebrated in Germany precisely as the country’s only successful bottom-up democratic revolution. In rehearsals as the Berlin Wall fell, Müller’s play thus found itself in a strange time warp as past, present, and future all at once, a play about a certain impossibility of action in action. In a fast-changing environment, with its images of rebellion drawn from Hungary in 1956, the play itself became a symptom, cause, and casualty of revolution and unification.

ENTER GHOST Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a theater student named Romy Weyrauch stumbled upon Heiner Müller’s production binders for these rehearsals while doing research for her final exams in the archives of Berlin’s Academy of Arts. Born in the East shortly before unification, she grew up with an implicit understanding at home and at school that the theme East-West “should not play a role” in polite discussion, even if it

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wasn’t explicitly taboo. She had internalized much of the silence she perceived about the GDR as it remained all around her yet largely invisible. “Hamlet’s children too,” as Santner wrote about inherited psychic structures, “find themselves haunted by ghosts of the past.”10 Thus it seemed almost transgressive when she came across a letter in the binder, written in November 1989, to then West German chancellor Helmut Kohl from members of the Deutsches Theater in (East) Berlin, which began as follows: “With increasing irritation we observe your endeavors for democracy in the GDR.”11 The letter was written just as protesters in the street were altering their slogan from “we are the people” to “we are one people,” the decisive discursive shift toward unification. For Romy, as for many of her generation, the short but intense era of homegrown reform—“we are the people”— became discursively marginalized in everyday interactions as the years went on. The unified Germany where she came of age, with its controversial neoliberal social welfare programs and “solidarity” tax to support Eastern development, did not feel like a place that once stood on the cusp of radical social transformation. In her hands, however, the letter was an artifact of an era before “everything” became settled, admonishing the unification chancellor for being a free rider (Trittbrettfahrer) on the hard-won achievements of East Germans, proclaiming “the GDR People fought on their own for their reforms and will so in the future.”12 Her Western colleague Martin Zepter, then also a theater student, had a parallel feeling of intimate distance from the events of 1989. He grew up in small-town Bavaria, a place where “you were already an outsider if you somehow criticized the local CDU mayor” and it was unquestioned that Kohl had saved their Eastern brethren from economic scarcity and political repression.13 Neither consider themselves nostalgic or naive—what caught their attention was not the substance of the failed dreams of the era, but the postunification denial of the very desire itself to find an alternative that, however unlikely, offered a sense of possibility, of agency, of a different future. The letter felt suddenly like a hidden inheritance, and the pages of the archive were like discovering a hidden door to a secret garden.

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The archive itself presented a missing complexity and nuance in a context where Romy’s fellow students “always said, oh, East-West, right, oh, we’ve exhausted that topic, we’ve spoken so much about the East before, enough already, not again.” Leafing through the binder, she became captivated by its material mirroring of the intricacy of the era: “I just started to read, with a different focus in mind actually, and became totally fascinated by how the folder went back and forth between historical newspaper articles mixed up with play scripts mixed with transcripts from actor’s conversations, all filed one after the other. It was like leafing through layers. And since I already knew that I wanted to deal with the East or the collapse (Zusammenbruch)—I mean simply, deal with it personally— it somehow all came together very well.14 This gave Romy and Martin the idea of writing or, more precisely, textually arranging a play for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be performed by the collective theatrale subversion, that used juxtaposition and citation to undermine the mythic power of established narratives about reunification. In the spirit of the archival production binder, the ensuing play 1989 [Exit Ghost] (which I will refer to as Exit Ghost) is at once a partial performance of Hamlet, of Heiner Müller’s Hamlet Machine, of conversations drawn from Hamlet Machine rehearsal notes in the fall of 1989, of documentation of contemporary texts and media, and of the actors playing themselves and each other. Against a minimalist set, actors slip between fictional figures, historical figures, and themselves, all of them from the post-1989 generation in their twenties and thirties. The events of 1989 ultimately form a backdrop for the appearance of recent protests in Greece, Spain, and the Middle East.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE Romy and Martin’s Exit Ghost resurrects Hamlet Machine’s earlier sense of an incomplete revolution or, more precisely, the idea of revolution as inherently, perhaps tragically, incomplete, in a sense impossible even as it

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is happening. This stands in contrast to how Hamlet Machine was received when it was finally performed in East Berlin, in March of 1990, where it was widely received as a requiem for an already doomed GDR rather than a suggestion of the impossibility of successful revolution.15 By returning to the unsettled nature of the original, Exit Ghost captures an indeterminate unease for this generation that often accompanies the yearly anniversary of the fall of the wall, with its television specials and exhibits. This is especially, though not exclusively, the case for the so-called third generation East for whom the end of the East German state was often embodied in the form of family and personal changes with wildly contradictory results.16 Many of their parents split up or changed in ways mysterious to their children. The general excitement of the era was tempered with fear of the unknown, settling into an emotional mix that made 1989 an uncertain territory, an emotional minefield. Coming on the twentieth anniversary, the public was particularly saturated with a wave of images, and the actors of Exit Ghost turn themselves into a collective Hamlet standing on the coast of the media-transmitted past, speaking with the surf. “I see pictures from then” says the actor Norman, “and I have to hold back tears or actually cry and I really don’t even know why.” Could it be, his colleagues offer, the sheer emotional impact of seeing so much rage, will, and hope (“above all, the hope”)? Or the fact that so much was then at stake? Or that the images exert an effect like spirit possession? Or is it the keen sense of watching a moment in which a world disappeared? Or, reflects Norman again, “Is it because something is gone that affected me, because I was born there, but I have no chance to make my own impressions of it and, for better or worse, have to believe and know that which I cannot believe or know, and in which I cannot trust, because I didn’t touch or feel it with my own eyes, my heart, my own understanding?”17 This deep mistrust of media narratives told through the images extends to the actor’s mistrust of their own emotional reactions to images from before. The year 1989 in Exit Ghost is not the past but the ghost that accompanies their own biographies and becomes mixed up with them: “the Wende for me is closely yoked to the years-long

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relationship crisis of my parents,” pronounces Sascha in the play, “And I ask myself till today how much this crisis was caused by the events of 1989 or simply private differences.”18 For the actors in the play, 1989 thus moves into the realm of taboo—not so much asking what did their parents really do in the GDR, as with the 1968 generation in West Germany, but wondering more what did 1989 bring out in their parents that made them suddenly different people, and what would their parents and themselves have been like under different circumstances?

A DOUBLE INHERITANCE Exit Ghost resists two well-worn paths in dealing with the recent past that make it an apt coda to this book’s larger subject of memory from below. The play avoids the form of personal memoir (in the direction, for example, of Jana Hensel’s Zone Children) and also avoids claiming the mantle of a generational movement in the spirit of 1968, as has been much discussed in connection to the “third generation East.”19 The former risks depoliticization through its introverted gaze, and the latter risks overpoliticizing by tethering this generation to nearly fifty-year-old ideological battle lines.20 Rather, Exit Ghost performs what Koga calls a double inheritance of the past, where the recognition of one’s own inheritance necessarily involves the recognition of the other’s inheritance.21 Exit Ghost raises and mixes up of experiences from East and West, performatively making the other’s inheritance into one’s own. The expressions of the so-called third generation East are interwoven with less-often-heard Western reflections about lost privilege: “I wish communism back because we used to stand on the side of the winner. . . . We had a happy childhood between tropical fruit and masters of the universe figures. . . . Today there is no GDR anymore. And thus also no winning side.”22 This recognition of the other’s inheritance is also literally embodied: The actors themselves come half and half from the former East and West (this was not intentional, but fortuitous) and play each other when

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recounting personal experiences. In other words, an actor from the West will recount the experiences of a colleague from the East and vice versa. The audience would be unlikely to know which actor was from where, and even less likely to know to whom to attribute personal experiences, so this effect is primarily part of the group dynamics. Just as the play avoids falling too deeply into memoir style or the factional politics of 1968, it also avoids becoming a requiem for lost chances. The inheritance of the 1989 generation is ambiguous, and especially so for the artists/activists at the heart of Exit Ghost. Here laudable actions come with a sense of being used and ultimately losing out. The play, while acknowledging the achievements of 1989 and celebrating the rediscovery of marginalized historical agency, is tempered by a sense of almost-butnot-quite, by a kind of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, especially for those in East and West who believed seriously in a third way. This is where the ghost of Hamlet, and not Hamlet’s father, becomes the real haunting of the generation at the core of this play. The key image in Exit Ghost is Müller’s Hamlet, forever standing on the shore, speaking “with the surf BLAH BLAH.”23 Again and again in Exit Ghost Hamlet stands at the shore, talking with the foaming waves breaking against the coast, only to have his words disappear into the meaningless “BLAH BLAH” of the Hamlet Machine. Of the many themes running through Exit Ghost, the inability of language to convey meaning, drowned by the noise of the surf, unanswered by the indifference of the surf, is perhaps the most persistent. People speak and are not heard, or they speak and their words are meaningless, or they speak and are booed. An actress channels the famous East German novelist Christa Wolf ’s helplessness as she addresses the East German public at the height of demonstrations: “We are aware of the impotence of words in the face of mass movements, but we have no other means than our words.” Later, an actress reads a Hamlet Machine rehearsal note from about the same time: “the cries from the street would suddenly become so loud that we kept having to fall silent in the theater.” After the wall falls, rehearsal notes no longer mention intermittent silence on the set but rather a general condition of speechlessness (sprachlosigkeit).24

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This aphasia appears on the stage as well as in the text. Heiner Müller’s 1990 set started with ice and ended in fire. Exit Ghost remains frozen, the only props blue plastic water containers like huge ice cubes that can be moved around the stage like blocks, forming imaginary coastlines and borders. “Whether you are familiar with Müller’s staging or not,” said Zepter, “what I found compelling about the ice cube metaphor is how the surf is frozen. This stagnation . . . it simply stops moving; one stands in front and can scream, and one can try to confront it, but this wave is simply frozen, that is, it signals the end point of society. It conveys stagnation for and in the present, where we don’t know how it goes on from here.”25

THE COAST OF UTOPIA The inheritance is ultimately one of a Hamlet-sized helplessness. The actors of the post-1989 generation come to feel kinship with the disoriented cast of Hamlet Machine sitting desultorily in the rehearsal space of the Deutsches Theater, which here also becomes the space of German theater. The Deutsches Theater staff ’s letter proclaiming “annoyance” at the West German chancellor Kohl’s usurping of their revolution signals for them the loss of a chance at utopia, so deeply do they associate the capitalist West with a totalizing force. This fear of capitalism as totalizing is, in a way, even more present today in the many diffuse movements against an equally diffuse but seemingly omnipresent “neoliberalism.” For the post-1989 generation, globalization, not reunification, is the disempowering context. The actors convey a feeling of being overwhelmed by complexity and lacking sufficient knowledge to properly interpret events: “Germany was part of the EEC, then the EC, now the EU, the G7 then the G8, the G8+1, G9+3, G20. OPEC, NATO, the UN, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the World Security Conference, the International Criminal Court, the People’s Council, the WHO, the WTO, and, and, and . . . ” Against these “not democratic institutions” appears a contrary list of

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movements: “Attac, Occupy and Anonymous and-and-and, all the way to the Pirate Party.”26 But ultimately, the actors seem to conclude, nobody really knows where power lies today, so it is even more difficult than in GDR times to oppose it. Outrage at “capitalism” (“more than in a long time”) is thus quickly checked by fear of incautiously seeking to destroy “a halfway functioning state” without anything to replace it, creating a power vacuum. The ghosts of Weimar remain as present as always, the fear of the right wing remains real and has only become more so in the years since Exit Ghost was written. Perhaps the only thing that remains is to reject Hamlet. Müller’s Hamlet tried this, stating at one point in his Hamlet Machine, “I’m not Hamlet, I don’t play a role anymore.” Exit Ghost’s actors agree, repeating, “I don’t want to be Hamlet anymore” and, finally, “I am not Hamlet anymore. I sit in a bar and drink. Glug glug.” Instead of talking to the surf, Exit Ghost’s not-Hamlet talks to the television and orders another beer. Instead of asking profound questions about being, not-Hamlet asks whether she should retreat to a friend’s country house, the one with that tasty homemade schnapps.27 “I don’t think,” says actor Sascha at one point, “that there will soon be a revolution,” seemingly answering affirmatively the question asked of the ghost in Hamlet Machine: “is one state funeral not enough for you?” In this way, “to be or not to be” morphs into “what is to be done?” Here we seem to land upon the coast of utopia, as Tom Stoppard explored in his eponymous play about Russian intellectuals also grappling with the question of what it means to act. If utopia is the “actual home (eigentliche Heimat)” of youth, as Thomas Shubert puts it writing about Exit Ghost, then this is a play about a situation common to all generations, not some kind of homesickness for the GDR.28 But Exit Ghost is not only about a generational yearning for utopia. It is also about a desire to claim ownership over events that directly affected their lives. It does this through an aesthetic of assemblage that, in homage to Irwin Piscator, mixes up the theater’s hierarchy of text, image, stage, and sound and in so doing mixes up the viewer’s normalized hierarchies of coherent history.

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Exit Ghost exemplifies the workings of appropriation—the process of making something one’s own—that, this book contends, deserves a conceptual status along with memory to understand how ordinary people engage with difficult pasts. As cultural theorist Dominic Pettman writes, appropriation is more than taking something for one’s own use; it is a conscious borrowing that “ruptures with the tradition in order to make you think again about tradition.”29 The tradition that Exit Ghost ruptures is, in fact, the rupture of tradition itself. Through Exit Ghost, we think tradition through its ruptures and, in the process, wonder even what exactly counts as a rupture: “Is the GDR a Trojan horse that has been slipped into the Federal Republic, now activated and unfolding its potential?” is the question that frames the play, asked once at the beginning and again at the end. The play makes clear enough that this is not meant as some recalcitrant communist fantasy. Quite the opposite: if the GDR can be officially celebrated as Germany’s one successful democratic revolution, the play seems to ask, is that democratic spirit not somehow still active, however compromised, convoluted, and complicated? Is recognizing this as our inheritance not a form of doing justice to both the past and the present? And is doing justice not the most conscientious way of working through the past and of thinking with a clear heart and head about the future?

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. The graffiti appeared on December 4, 2008. It also gruffly echoed—purposely one must assume—the 2001 controversy over the fundraising campaign posters for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (aka Holocaust Memorial) in Berlin, which read: “Den Holocaust hat es nie gegeben” (The Holocaust never existed). See Franziska Becker, “Die Spendenkampagne für das Denkmal,” in Dieter Daniels and Inga Schwede, eds., Mahnmale in Berlin (Leipzig: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, 2004), https://www.hgb-leipzig.de/mahnmal/kampag .html. 2. Although unification can also refer to the 1871 unification of the German lands into the German Empire, I use the term unification rather than reunification to refer to the events of 1989–90 when East Germany (known formally as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) joined West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG). From the very beginning, these terms were used interchangeably. See William Safire, “On Language: Unify or Reunify?,” New York Times, February 25, 1990. 3. Constantin Graf von Hoensbroech, “Ostalgie ist eine Gefahr—Interview mit Joachim Gauck,” Die Freie Welt (2009), http://www.freiewelt.net/inter view/ostalgie -ist-eine-gefahr-interview-mit-joachim-gauck-12045/. 4. This quote comes from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s civic education multimedia guide, GDR—Myths and Reality, introduction to the section on everyday life, http://www.kas.de/wf/de/71.6585/. See Ulrich Bongertmann, DDR: Mythos und Wirklichkeit. Wie die SED Diktatur den Alltag der DDR-Bürger bestimmte (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2014).

184 Y Introduction 5. This figure comes from a 2009 Emnid poll, where 49 percent of former GDR citizens agreed with the statement that the GDR “had more good than bad sides,” and 8 percent that it was “predominantly better,” for a total of 57 percent. The numbers are inverted for West Germans, where 78 percent saw more bad than good. See Everhard Holtmann, “Die DDR—ein Unrechtsstaat?” (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2010). At the same time, by 2014 59 percent of Eastern Germans consider themselves “satisfied with life,” at essentially the same rate as West Germans (61 percent). See Andrew Kohut, “East Germans Now as Satisfied with Life as West Germans” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014). A telling number about the different way that unification is perceived in East and West, however, comes from a 2009 survey where 63 percent of Easterners felt they were positively affected by unification, while 67 percent of Westerners responded that they were simply not affected by unification. See Andrew Kohut, “Pew Global Attitudes Project: Two Decades After the Wall’s Fall” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2009). The difficulty of uniting two countries with radically different postwar experiences continues to be marked by socioeconomic differences in employment, incomes, and attitudes more than a generation after unification. 6. The quote is from Jan-Werner Müller, “Just Another Vergangenheitsbewältigung? The Process of Coming to Terms with the East German Past Revisited,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009), 338. See also Manuel Becker, “Die Bedeutung des deutschen Diktaturenvergleich für die politische Kultur der “Berliner Republik,” Deutschland Archiv, no. 8 (2011): 403–10. On the concept of double inheritance, see Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 7. The comparison cuts both ways, making it particularly difficult political terrain. On the one hand, not considering the GDR as (sufficiently) dictatorial raises fears that the dangers of dictatorship could be minimized, undermining support for the rule of law and relativizing the fascist dictatorship. On the other, equating East Germany too closely with the Nazi era could paradoxically also relativize the Nazi period and the unique place it occupies as the negative legitimation of postwar German history. No one argues seriously that the GDR is comparable in its criminality to the Nazis, however, this debate is embedded in a much larger, bitter controversy about comparing Nazism and Communism, exemplified by the so-called Black Book of Communism controversy in the late 1990s, whose German edition was expanded to include the GDR in what the book argued was an overall comparable scale of crimes.

Introduction Z 185 The postunification debate also echoes the famous “historians dispute” (Historikerstreit) in 1980s Germany questioning the uniqueness of Nazi totalitarianism. On the question of comparing the GDR and the Nazi period, see, among others, Konrad H. Jarausch, “Memory Wars: German Debates About the Legacy of Dictatorship,” in John Alexander Williams, ed., Berlin Since Wall’s End: Shaping Society and Memory in the German Metropolis Since 1989 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Jeffrey Herf, “Post-totalitarian Narratives in Germany: Reflections on Two Dictatorships After 1945 and 1989,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, nos. 2–3 (2008); and Richard J. Evans, “Zwei deutsche Diktaturen im 20. Jahrhundert?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, nos. 1–2 (2005). The nature of the East German dictatorship is a topic of much debate among historians. See, among others, the essays in Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 1999); Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989 (Berlin: Christoph Links, 1998); and Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also the contributions to Saskia Handro and Thomas Schaarschmidt, Aufarbeitung der Aufarbeitung: Die DDR im geschichts-kulturellen Diskurs (Schwalbach: Wochenschau, 2011). 8. Benjamin Nienass characterizes as a European ethics of memory the efforts by the European Union to establish a “postnational” collective memory that draws heavily on the German model. See Benjamin Nienass, “Postnational Relations to the Past: A ‘European Ethics of Memory’?” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26, no. 1 (2013): 41–55. See also Jenny Wüstenberg, “The Struggle for European Memory: New Contributions to an Emerging Field,” Comparative European Politics 15 (2014): 376–89. 9. The demise of the GDR coincided with a meteoric rise in global literature on memory in the humanities and social sciences, much of it focused on understanding how collective memories are forged, manipulated, maintained, and transferred. Parallel to debates in history around Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and the relation of history to memory, the growing “memory studies” field draws primarily from comparative literature, for example, in the important work of Andreas Huyssen, Marianne Hirsch, and James Young, and the sociology of collective memory, where work by Jeffrey Olick, among others, revitalized the work of Maurice Halbwachs. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University

186 Y Introduction Press, 2012); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsets and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jeffrey Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007). Reflecting their disciplinary heritages, these approaches tend to privilege the symbolic over the empirical, excepting Olick, who combines sociological and historical approaches in his exploration of Nazi memory in West Germany. See Jeffrey Olick, in The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). The German scholars Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann provide an influential contribution by proposing to distinguish between phases of “communicative” memory, where memory is primarily biographical and passed down through kin, and “cultural” memory where media digest and redeploy memory to those with no direct experience of the events. See Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). This categorization of phases, however, has difficulty capturing the experience of the GDR as a present absence because it implies too linear a progression from “communicative” to “cultural” memory, whereas in the case at hand they exist symbiotically and simultaneously. On this point, see also the critique of the Assmanns in Michael Meyen, “Wir haben freier gelebt.” Die DDR im kollektiven Gedächtnis der Deutschen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). 10. This is similar to what Bill Brown calls misuse value, where misuse “frees objects from the systems to which they’ve been beholden” and focuses attention on the “excess matter and meaning” that otherwise remains largely invisible. Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 234–35. The objects in my study are certainly things in Brown’s sense, activated by the interaction between human subjects and material objects. While my approach to materiality is ontologically consistent with the shared sense of agency between people and things that occupies the theoretical thrust of more nuanced work in “thing theory” such as Brown’s work or Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), I seek to draw attention to thinking with things and people (together) to better understand how memory, that often ethereal subject, is grounded in encounters with materiality and how those encounters serve as mechanisms for intergenerational transmission, especially (but not only) under conditions of rapid social change. I agree with Andreas Huyssen when he writes that Walter Benjamin remains key to the memory-materiality constellation because

Introduction Z 187 histories and temporalities, as Benjamin long ago pointed out, congeal around material objects, making them available for being reworked by subsequent generations. See Andreas Huyssen, “Memory Things and Their Temporality,” Memory Studies 9, no. 1 (2015): 107–10. Temporality and the question of generational transmission is underplayed in work on human-object interaction, especially in the actor-network variations, though temporality plays a central role in the biographical approach in anthropology set out in Igor Kopytoff ’s classic “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 64–91. For a trenchant critique of the “material turn” that sees the focus on nonhuman objects as a kind of compensation for a crisis of representation, see Severin Fowles, “The Perfect Subject (Postcolonial Object Studies),” Journal of Material Culture 21, no. 1 (2016): 9–27. 11. A cognate analysis of how physical remains, space, and testimony circulate to create a persistent unsettling of dominant narratives about the Second World War can be found in Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). As with Yoneyama’s study, the cases here show how display and musealization function as a mechanism for circulation, in contrast to Huyssen’s landmark Twilight Memories, which captures how the past becomes locked in museums, taking the form of amnesia within “burial chambers” of the past. This book’s concept of unsettling echoes architectural historian Mark Jarzombek’s writing about Dresden’s postsocialist cityscape, where he notes that one can hardly “move from the increasingly official public discourses of memory, restitution, monuments, and obligations to the residual presence of other types of histories without opening up a seemingly unfathomable space of uncertainty about the nature of the public realm.” See Mark Jarzombek, Urban Heterology: Dresden and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History (Lund: Lund University Studies in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics, 2001), 22. On how vernacular urban spaces in everyday life relate to collective memory, see also Paul Stangl, “The Vernacular and the Monumental: Memory and Landscape in Post-war Berlin,” GeoJournal 73, no. 3 (2008): 245–53. For a historical exploration of how everyday life and memory intersected with the built environment in the GDR, specifically the famous Marzahn housing project in East Berlin, see Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 12. See, for example, Zsuza Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist

188 Y Introduction Moscow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). In China, as objects from the Cultural Revolution era are being appropriated for design and consumption, one can see elements of the nostalgia of style that I discuss in the first chapter. See the introduction to Helen Wang, Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (London: British Museum, 2008); the special issue on “Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution” edited by Guobin Yang and Mingbao Yue in the China Review 5, no. 2 (Fall 2005); and Haian Xue and Martin Woolley, “Design and Nostalgia: Idealized Memory and Strategic Design Innovation in China,” Journal of Design Strategies 6 (2015), http://sds.parsons.edu/ designdialogues. 13. The story of East German plastics is told in riveting detail in Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). See also Paul Betts, “Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design,” German History 29, no. 2 (2011). 14. Influential texts in English among historians who pay significant attention to everyday life under socialism include Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). While historical texts highlight how the everyday sphere was crucial to both the identity of citizens and the legitimacy of the GDR regime, they are seldom concerned with following the everyday into the present, with notable exceptions such as Paul Betts, “The Twighlight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (2000). In English this task has fallen primarily to the fields of film and literature, such as Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (New York: Berg, 2005), which uses postcolonial theory to examine film, literature, and television or a number of similarly oriented edited volumes resulting from conferences around the twentieth anniversary of 1989. In the German-language literature, see especially the publications of the Potsdam Center for Contemporary History and those of the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur). Anthropolgists are disciplinarily sensitive to the interplay of the everyday and materiality. Sharon Macdonald, for example, explores these in the context of European memory cultures, including Germany, in Memorylands: Heritage and

Introduction Z 189 Identity in Europe Today (New York: Routledge, 2013). Daphne Berdahl’s now classic ethnography of an isolated inner-German socialist border town in 1990–92 identifies critical everyday spaces such as nostalgia and consumption that this book builds upon. See Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Daphne Berdahl and Matti Bunzl, On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Besides Berdahl’s early and important contributions, however, most anthropological work on the afterlife of socialism has focused less on the everyday than on institutional or structural cases, such as John Borneman’s examination of the construction of criminality in state-governed attempts at retributive justice, Dominique Boyer’s exploration of intellectuals, or Andreas Glaeser’s ethnography of police in Berlin. See John Borneman, Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System. Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Andreas Glaeser, Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 15. More attention is paid outside of former East Germany to the intersection of the everyday and materiality, notably Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History; and Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow, as well as Svetlana Boym’s wonderful Common Places (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Recent explorations that parallel what I’m trying to do in certain key ways in other countries include Krisztina Fehérváry, Politics in Color and Concrete (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Gerald W. Creed, Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Michał Murawski’s ethnographic work on Warsaw’s Palace of Culture in “Palaceology, or Palace-as-Methodology: Ethnographic Conceptualism, Total Urbanism, and a Stalinist Skyscraper in Waraw,” Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 5, no. 2 (2013): 56–83. See also the contributions in Choi Chatterjee et al., Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst, eds., Remembering Communism, Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe (Budapest: CEU, 2014); and Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, eds., Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In a different vein, the work of the Wende Museum in Los

190 Y Introduction

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

Angeles on the material culture of the GDR is perhaps the most extensive in English. See Justinian Jampol, Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR (New York: Taschen, 2014). See Andrew Bergerson, Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 262; Alf Lüdkte, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Betts, Within Walls. Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43(2014). Ibid. This is similar to the way that decolonization left, as Ann Stoler puts it, “imperial debris” strewn across Europe’s erstwhile colonies, which contain, in their ruinous form, acutely “condense[d] alternative sense[s] of history” that “people are left with” and that have to be actively engaged. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008). Koga in Inheritance of Loss shows how such remains circulate through contemporary encounters with the physical remnants of colonial modernity in northeast China. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950). For an interesting contrast of British approaches to appropriation based on loss and alienation and French approaches that focus on non-normative integration of objects into daily routines, see Pamela Baillette and Chris Kimble, “The Concept of Appropriation as a Heuristic for Conceptualising the Relationship between Technology, People and Organisations,” in 13th UKAIS Conference (Bournemouth: UK Academy for Information Systems, 2008). For an overview of anthropological approaches to the topic, see Veronica Strang and Mark Busse, eds., Ownership and Appropriation (New York: Berg, 2011). Robin Wagner-Pacifici, “Theorizing the Restlessness of Events,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 5 (2010). See Josiah Heyman, “Ports of Entry as Nodes in the World System,” Identities 11, no. 3 (2010). The idea that commodification of the past poses an obstacle to memory is the argument of Gary Cross, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), who provides the quote. By contrast, I see commodification driving new forms of interactions with past remains, from aesthetic choices in consumption to uses of urban space in the context of the creative and cultural economy.

1. “The Taste Remains” Z 191

1. “THE TASTE REMAINS” 1. HVB Immobilien (2013), “Oberbaum City,” http://oberbaum-city.com/projects/ index_1000091.html. 2. The curators originally sought to make fun of the West by calling the shop Kaufhaus des Ostens (KaDeO, or Department store of the East) as a conscious satire of the famous Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe, or Department store of the West) in West Berlin. A letter from KaDeWe’s lawyer convinced the curators to change the name, and a similar legal problem enjoined their second choice, Kaufhalle des Ostens (Shopping hall of the East). So it was back to the GDR and Intershop. The official name, Intershop 2000, is presumably in legal deference to the large electronics chain store that uses the name Intershop. 3. The German word here—Nostalgie—is nearly identical to the English nostalgia. Hence ostalgia in German is Ostalgie. I use the English equivalent in the text. 4. While this chapter focuses specifically on ostalgia in relation to consumer products, ostalgia takes many forms, from the renaissance of East German rock bands like City and Die Phudys to television shows devoted to ostalgia featuring former GDR celebrities like the figure skater Katerina Witt. See the discussion of television shows in Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (New York: Berg, 2005); and music in Peter Wicke, “Born in the GDR: Ostrock Between Nostalgia and Cultural Self-assertion,” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 6, no. 2 (1998): 148–55.” On the role of the Internet in ostalgia, see Jonathan Bach, “Vanishing Acts and Virtual Reconstructions: Technologies of Memory and the Afterlife of the GDR,” in Silke Arnoldde Simine, ed., Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005). See also Petra Rethmann’s analysis of a GDR-themed hotel in “Post-Communist Ironies in an East German Hotel,” Anthropolgy Today, no. 25 (2009): 21–23. 5. See Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). She is building here on Fredric Jameson’s discussion of nostalgia in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 19. 6. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xiii. 7. Milena Veenis, “Consumption in East Germany—the Seduction and Betrayal of Things,” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 1 (1999): 86. 8. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith, Writing New Identities. Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Minneapolis: University of

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

Minnesota Press, 1997), 265. Nostalgia, argues Dominik Bartmanski, provides a sense of continuity between past and present. See “Successful Icons of a Failed Time: Rethinking Post-Communist Nostalgia,” Acta Sociologica 54, no. 3 (2011): 213–31. On the temporality of nostalgia as future-oriented, see Dominic Boyer, “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 361–81. See also Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). In Jürgen Roth and Michael Rudolf, Spaltprodukte. Gebündelte Ost-West-Vorurteile (Leipzig: Reclam, 1997). Detlef Pollack and Gert Pickel, Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in Ost- und Westdeutschland: eine Befragung (Frankfurt: Lehrstuhl für Vergleichende Kultursoziologie der Europa-Universität, 1998), 23. Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 140. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997). Kathi baked goods: “Der Osten hat gewählt”; Club Cola: “Hurra, ich lebe noch; Von einigen belächelt, ist sie doch nicht tot zu kriegen Club Cola—die Cola aus Berlin”; Super Illu: “Eine von uns”; Rondo coffee: “Natürlich war nicht alles schlecht, was wir früher gemacht haben”; Juwel cigarettes: “Ich rauche Juwel, weil ich den Westen schon getestet hab’. Eine für uns”; Karo cigarettes: “Anschlag auf den Einheitsgeschmack”; f6 cigarettes: “Der Geschmack Bleibt” On these and other slogans, see Conrad Lay, “Der Siegeszug der Ostprodukte. Zur Mentalitätsund Produktgeschichte der deutschen Vereinigung,” Kommune, no. 1 (1997); and Roth and Rudolf, Spaltprodukte. See, for example, “Das Geheimnis der Ost-Schrippe,” Berliner Kurier, July 29, 2014, http://www.berliner-kurier.de/2012056. Christa Wolf, What Remains and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). On the role of the second, “black” economy as essential to the functioning of the first, “legitimate” economy, see Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). On the constant stimulation of consumer desire and its postsocialist effects, see also John Borneman, After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and his Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). See also Berdahl, Where the World Ended, chapter 4. Borneman, After the Wall, 81. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:32.

1. “The Taste Remains” Z 193 19. Lay, “Der Siegeszug der Ostprodukte.” 20. Jürgen Hartwig, “Einleitung,” Rundbrief (1996). The Rondo quote appears in Thomas Ahbe, Ostalgie: Zum Umgang mit der DDR Vergangenheit in den 1990er Jahren (Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen, 2005), 50. 21. Berdahl, Where the World Ended, 137. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 23. Lay, “Der Siegeszug der Ostprodukte,” 5. See also the analysis of how Western advertisments are adapted and subverted in the former GDR in Beret Norman, “Test the West: East German Performance Art Takes on Western Advertising,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 3 (2000), 255–67. 24. Christian Duncker, “. . . und sie leben doch. Was machen eigentlich die DDRMarken?” (Erfurt: MDR-Werbung, 2009). 25. In Lay, “Der Siegeszug der Ostprodukte,” 5. The Frankfurt-based advertising company Michael Conrad and Leo Burnett won a prize (the “Golden Effie Award”) for the f6 campaign with the slogan “The Taste Remains.” The award speech noted that “the ‘f6’ is a declaration of belief [Bekenntnis] in a piece of Eastern Germany. Probably smokers there have a similarity with Americans, who look back at a short history, and cling gladly to the little authentic and traditional that remains.” As Anita Beier notes, “the f6 campaign was recognized as associating the image of the large eastern German market as consisting of handed down values such as reliability, consistency, dependability, and resilience.” In Anita Beier, Imagewerbung für Markenartikelzigaretten (Hamburg: Diplomica, 1994). The reintroduction of GDR-brand cigarettes builds on a desire one sees already in a joke from the unification era: “After the currency union a man comes in the store and asks for a pack of Cabinet [cigarettes]. “Don’t got none” says the saleswoman. “What, that all over again?” In Wolfgang Janowitz and Eduard Huk, Berlin Jewendet: Das “Letzte” aus der DDR (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1990), 79. 26. Horst Groschopp and Jörg Lau, “Ein Gespräch zwischen Horst Groschopp und Jörg Lau über: Die Einsamkeit des Kulturwissenschaftlers,” Der Alltag. Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht 72 ( June 1996): 25. A GDR cartoon from shortly after the currency union has a worker saying to his supervisor, “Well boss, we got the West packaging, now we just have to figure out which product to put in it.” In Janowitz and Huk, Berlin Jewendet, 67. 27. Georg C. Bertsch and Ernst Hedler, SED. Schönes Einheits-Design, Stunning Eastern Design, Savoir Eviter le Design (Cologne: Taschen, 1990), 7, 12, 27. 28. Hilmar Schmundt, “Die Umbesetzer. Drei Eastside Stories aus dem Besetzermilieu zwischen Western und Gestern,” Der Alltag. Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht 72 ( Juni 1996): 125.

194 Y 1. “The Taste Remains” 29. Ibid., 119, 127–29. For those who actually worked in the GDR design world, like Günther Höhne, the former editor of the GDR design journal Form und Zweck (Form and purpose), the focus of ostalgie on East German design is a travesty. “Of all things, the Trabant—that lumpish, pastel-colored, clattering, hazardous stinking motorized torture instrument—became the leading symbol for GDR design, followed by the plastic rooster eggcups, Dederon kitchen aprons, Bakelite cable spools, aluminum cutlery, Tempo-brand peas, and Sprachlos-brand cigars. Anyone who didn’t already know could now see how stupidly twee the everyday was in the GDR’s economy of scarcity and mismanagement, and how dumb the Ossi must have been to be satisfied with this for all those years . . . ” Höhne has spent the years since unification collecting and documenting GDR design with an eleven-book series on GDR design and the Web site industrieform-ddr.de/. The quote is from an opening speech he gave for a GDR design exhibit. Günther Höhne, “Eines wird bleiben: Das DDR-Design” Opening speech for the exhibit “Es war einmal . . . DDR Alltägliches aus der Sammlung Krais/Reuter,” Fränkischen Museum Feuchtwangen, May 20, 2011. 30. Schmundt, “Die Umbesetzer,” 109. 31. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Ostalgie. Revaluing the Past, Regressing into the Future,” GDR Bulletin 25, no. 1 (1998): 1. The ostalgia party was organized by Ralf Heckel. 32. Ibid. 33. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 56. 34. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 299. They were writing more generally about disorientation wrought by globalization, but the postunification disorientation in Germany also elevated consumption to a privileged site for identity construction. 35. The contents of a typical East packet vary. Ostpaket’s “Large” package (Euro 49 in 2013) focuses on comestibles and includes Sandmann tea, Rondo coffee, Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine, two plastic egg cups, Timm’s Saurer (citrus-flavored vodka), plastic collapsible cups, Badusan bath soap, Komet pudding and Komet grits with semolina, Nudossi hazelnut spread, Sywan Herring filets, Tempolinsen instant lentils, Werder ketchup, Novum aktiv cleaning agent, Nuth spot remover, Tintex spot remover, Berggold jellied fruits, Chokies cookies, Dresden “Russian” bread, Crispy Corn Flakes, Zetti chocolate bar, Tangermünde Nährstange candy, and Wikana cookies. By comparison, Ostprodukte Versand’s Ostalgie Paket (Euro 39.50) includes mostly gag items: a GDR flag, Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine, a “Hero of Labor” mug, a

1. “The Taste Remains” Z 195

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

“Be Prepared” condom, a GDR emblem sticker, “Hero of Labor” shower gel, an “Activist of the highest order” yardstick, a GDR emblem sewing patch. The store OLShop.de offers fourteen themed East packages (e.g., cult, Christmas, for men or women, wellness, household, groceries, etc.) from 19.90 to 35 Euros. The groceries package (35 Euros), for example, includes Rondo coffee, Werder ketchup, Filinchin cracker bread, Wikana cookies, Tempolinsen instant lentils, Hallorenkugeln chocolates, Viba nougat, Zetti chocolate bar, Zetti crisp cornflakes, Viba peanuts, Rügenfisch Scomber Mix (canned fish), Nudossi hazelnut spread, Bautzner mustard, Wurzener peanut flips, Rotstern Mokka coffee beans, Neukircher crackers, Halberstädter dried sausage, and Lausitzer linseed oil. In German: “Rückwärts nimmer—saufen immer!” This phrase is a parody of East German leader Erich Honecker’s oft-mocked phrase, repeated during his last official speech for the fortieth anniversary of the GDR on October 9, 1989, “onwards forever, backwards never” (“vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer”). The package, available in many East product shops and online, is regularly updated to be a mock anniversary celebration. The most recent one of this writing was labeled “Almost 64 years GDR!” and markets itself with the line “I’ll really drink all of you!” (“Ich trinke euch doch Alle!”), a play on the famous statement by Erich Mielke, the former head of the feared Ministry for State Security, who is widely quoted as proclaiming, “I really love all of you!” as his power crumbled. Cf. Olga Shevchenko and Maya Nadkarni, “The Politics of Nostalgia. A Case for Comparative Analysis of Postsocialist Practices,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004): 487–519. Jokes and humor were a central component of socialism across the Soviet bloc. See, for example, Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009); Christie Davies, “Jokes as the Truth About Soviet Socialism,” Folklore 46 (2010): 9–32; and Serguei A. Oushakine, “Laughter Under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity,” Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (2011): 247–55. It is little surprise that humor also became a means to deal with unification in former East Germany in many registers. See Jill Twark, Humor, Satire and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s (New York: de Gruyter, 2007). Boris Dombrowski, “Wer Entsorgt den DDR-Kitsch?” BZ, August 13, 2010, http://www.bz-berlin.de/aktuell/berlin/wer-entsorgt-den-ddr-kit sch -arti cle948194.html. Dennis Sieberman, Letter to the editor regarding Katharina Pauli, “DDR Produkte: das umstrittene Geschäft mit der Erinnerung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 23, 2012, http://www.faz.net.gqe-72bhp.

196 Y 1. “The Taste Remains” 41. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 7–8. 42. See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, “American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal About Contemporary Political Culture in the West,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010). 43. Ivor A. Stodolsky, “A Non-Aligned Intelligentsia: Timur Novikovs Neo-Avantgarde and the Afterlife of Leningrad Non-Conformism,” Studies in East European Thought 63, no. 2 (2011). 44. Konrad Paul Liessmann, Das Unviersum der Dinge. Zur Ästhetik des Alltäglichen (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2010). 45. Hyde, Trickster Makes this World, 7. 46. Comment posted to the Goodbye Lenin Web Forum by “MF” on March 3, 2003, http://www.good-bye-lenin.de/forum.php. See, for example, the high-concept reworking of GDR logos by the designer Bluedog725: http://www.redbubble. com/explore/ostalgie+retro+gdr+ddr?ref=explore_tag_refinement. 47. Serguei Alex Oushakine, “‘We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” Russian Review 66, no. 3 (2007): 456. 48. “National in form, socialist in content” was a communist slogan that impacted all areas of culture, from architecture to products to music. See Marina FrolovaWalker, “‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (1998); and Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 49. Thomas Trappe, “Boom bei Ostprodukten. Ein Hauch von DDR,” Süddeutsche Zeitung June 1, 2012, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/geld/boom-bei-ostprodukten -ein-hauch-von-ddr-1.1252345. 50. Viktor in Jan Willmroth, “DDR-Marken. Schluss mit der Ostalgie,” Der Spiegel, October 3, 2010. 51. “Zwar eine Mauer gegeben hat – aber daneben auch so viel Schönes im eigenen Land,” https://www.ostprodukte-versand.de/ostalgie.html. 52. Ostpaket 2013. 53. The top Eastern brands, not all distributed in the Western states, include alcoholic beverages (Rottkäppchen Sekt, Nordhäuser Doppelkorn, and Köstritzer, Wernesgrüner, Hasseröder, and Radeberger beers), sweets (Halloren Kugel, Grabower Küsschen, Frischli cookies, Komet desserts, Nudossi spread, Schlager chocolates), baked goods (Kathi baking mixes, Burger Knäckebrot, Filinchin

2. Collecting Communism Z 197

54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

crackers, Teigwaren Riese), detergents (Spee, Fit), body and bath (Florena cream, Badusan soaps), Bautz’ner Senf, Halberstädter sausages, Vita Cola, Werder Ketchup, coffee (Rondo coffee, In Nu malt coffee), and, of course, Spreewald pickles. Armin Rehberg, “K(Ö)stlich: Das Penny-Herz schlägt Ost,” SuperIllu 8 (2009): 35. See Institut für Marktforschung Leipzig, “Markenbarometer Ost” (Leipzig: Institut für Marktforschung Leipzig, 2010); and Volker Müller, “Der ostdeutsche Konsument zwischen Anpassung und Verweigerung – von der DDR bis heute,” Institut für Marktforschung Leipzig (2005). Ruediger, “Haben Westdeutsche kein Qualitätsbewusstsein?,” in Forum DDRMarken (Spiegel online, 2010), http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/ ddr-marken-schluss-mit-ostalgie-a-718647.html. On the history of Nudossi, see Jürgen Helfricht, Der Nudossi Code (Husum: Husum, 2012). See also “Nudossi vs. Nutella” Senf Dazu! January 2, 2009, http://senfdazu.blogspot.com/2009/01/ nudossi-vs-nutella.html. Shevchenko and Nadkarni, “The Politics of Nostalgia.” See also Olga Shevchenko, ed., Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2014). Ampelmann-Japan, Concept (2013), Ampelmann.co.jp. Gil Eyal, “Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory,” History and Memory 16, no. 1 (2004). Ibid. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 65.

2. COLLECTING COMMUNISM 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa. An Inquiry Into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: Viking, 1947), 42. 2. Quoted in Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 3. Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 10. 4. The most prominent theorists of the everyday in this tradition are Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau. Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and the British school around Mass-Observation also play central roles. 5. On private spaces in the GDR, see especially Paul Betts, Within Walls, section 2, and Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State. On stiob, see Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, “American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal

198 Y 2. Collecting Communism

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

About Contemporary Political Culture in the West,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 179–221. See Andrew H. Beattie, “The Politics of Remembering the GDR: Official and State-Mandated Memory Since 1990,” in David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds., Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Martin Sabrow et al., Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? Dokumentation einer Debatte (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2007). Martin Sabrow, ed., Errinerungsorte der DDR (Munich: Beck, 2009), 13; and “Die DDR erinnern,” ibid. For issues of the everyday concerning national socialism, see Alf Lüdtke, Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994). Important exceptions include the very early design exhibit “SED: Schönes Einheits Design” and the German Historical Museum’s 2007 exhibit “Parteidiktatur und Alltag in der DDR.” The Documentation Center for GDR Everyday Culture in Eisenhüttenstadt, discussed later in this chapter, was also well known for their nuanced, professional special exhibits on everyday life. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 21. “Mitglieder stellen sich vor: Jürgen Friedhoff,” Rundbrief des Vereins zur Dokumentation der DDR-Alltagskultur e.V., no. 3 (1997): 9. Thomas Ahbe, “Hammer, Zirkel, Kaffeekranz,” Berliner Zeitung, February 5, 2000. “DDR-Geschichte vor dem Müll gerettet,” Märkische Oderzeitung, June 6, 2008, http://www.moz.de/artikel-ansicht/dg/0/1/16774. “Literatur in der Scheune,” Berliner Zeitung, November 9, 2009. Jan Faktor, “Mitglieder stellen sich vor,” Rundbrief des Vereins zur Dokumentation der DDR-Alltagskultur e.V. , no. 5 (1999): 7. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005), 104. Ibid. The currency under discussion is the Deutsche Mark. Stephan Krawczyk, “Mitglieder Stellen sich vor,” Rundbrief des Vereins zur Dokumentation der DDRAlltagskultur e.V., no.2 (1996): 12. David J. Parkin, “Mementoes as Transitional Objects in Human Displacement,” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 3 (1999). Ibid., 308. Ibid.

2. Collecting Communism Z 199 21. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith, Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 265. 22. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. 23. Jürgen Hartwig, “Einleitung,” Rundbrief des Vereins zur Dokumentation der DDRAlltagskultur e.V., no. 2 (1996). 24. Rolf Winkler, “DDR . . . Das kenne ich noch von damals,” http://www.ddr— das-kenne-ich-noch.de/kontakt.html. 25. Hartwig, “Einleitung.” 26. There is no generally agreed-upon number for private GDR museums dealing with everyday life or criteria for counting them. If one includes local heritage (Heimat) museums in the former East, or specialist museums, such as police or fire department vehicles, the number is considerably over one hundred, not including temporary exhibits or online exhibits. If, on the other hand, one considers only museums that meet the professional criteria of the International Council on Museums (see http://icom.museum/the-vision/museum-definition/), then probably less than ten would qualify. Many museums are small private collections that one would only stumble upon in a local town or find listed only in local tourist guides. My own list of private GDR everyday life museums includes, in eastern Germany, Apolda, Auerstedt (Erfurt), Berlin, Brandenburg an der Havel, Burg (Spreewald), Eisenhüttenstadt, Friedrichsbrunn (Harz), Gelenau, Greitz, Hohenstein (Harz), Langenweddingen, Malchow (Müritz), Mecklenburg Feriendorf Storchennest, Mühltroff, Neustadt (Dosse), Perleberg, Pirna, Radebeul, Schwemsal, Stassfurt, Thale, Tutow, and Wittenberg. There are surely more. In western Germany there are museums in Bochum and Pforzheim. See also Thalia Gigerenzer, Gedächtnislabore: Wie Heimatmuseen in Ostdeutschland an die DDR erinnern (Berlin: be.bra Wissenschaft Verlag, 2013). 27. Ludwig’s Documentation Center and Hartwig’s Association, despite their similar names, are independent entities. On the early days of the Documentation Center, see Charity Scribner’s discussion of the “Open Depot” in her Requiem for Communism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 23–45. 28. Hartwig, “Einleitung.” 29. Conny Kaden, “Chronik des DDR-Museum Pirna,” DDR Museum Pirna, http:// www.ddr-museum-pirna.de/index.php/chronik.html. 30. Notable exceptions to this style include Berlin, Eisenhüttenstadt, and Radebeul (near Dresden), which were all run by Westerners. It is also important to note that the former GDR design community, centered around the Industrial Design

200 Y 2. Collecting Communism

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

Collection (Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung), generally considers themselves apart from the amateur collectors museums, who they find unprofessional and lacking appreciation for design. The amateur collectors “do it with love and excitement but no intention to do anything more professional,” Günther Höhne, former editor of the GDR design journal Form und Zweck and himself a major collector of GDR design, told me. “I prefer those [museum directors] from the West to those from the East who run around with FDJ shirts and make terrible exhibits.” While individuals have also mounted their own private design-focused amateur exhibits, such as Axel Rachwalski’s Museum für Form Gestaltung in der DDR (Museum for design form in the GDR) in Wernigerode, a 50m2 exhibit about GDR design, an interesting difference is that they see GDR design squarely in the context of postwar modern German design, more similar to the Museum of Things in western Berlin, which sees both East and West Germany as part of one German tradition. “My dream” said Höhne, “is a German design museum, and my nightmare is a GDR design museum.” Günther Höhne, personal communication. On “we-identity,” see Aleida Assmann, Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur Und Geschichtspolitik. (Munich: Beck, 2006). On GDR private museums as sources of common identity, see Gigerenzer, Gedächtnislabore. On the special role that plastic plays in the creation of the GDR consumer society, including the famous eggcup, see Rubin, Synthetic Socialism. Ibid. http://www.ddr-museum-tutow-mv.de/veranstaltungsplan.html. “Ü ber eine halbe Million mal Geschichte zum Anfassen in 2012,” (Berlin: DDR Museum, 2013). Figures for Apolda and Radebeul are from their own internal estimates. See Sara Jones, “(Extra)ordinary Life: The Rhetoric of Representing the Socialist Everyday After Unification,” German Politics and Society 33, no. 1/2 (2015): 130, and Sabrow et al., Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung?, 34. Again, with the exception of Eisenhüttenstadt, which had been run by the West Berlin museum professional Andreas Ludwig. The founder of the Berlin DDR Museum is Peter Kenzelmann, from Freiburg in West Germany, and its first director, Robert Rückel, was also from the west. Its current director, Gordon Freiherr von Godin, came from a background in the hospitality industry. Martin Sabrow, “DDR-Alltag im Museum,” in DDR Museum, ed., 2 Jahre DDR Museum: Eine Kritische Bilanz (Berlin: DDR Museum, 2008), 12. The DDR Museum did change its exhibit in response to such criticisms, creating a whole new section devoted to the state and a mock interrogation room, discussed later in this chapter.

2. Collecting Communism Z 201 39. Gottfried Korff, Museumsdinge. Deponieren—Exponieren (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 36. “Möglicherweise eine falsche Strategie, weil sie die Aufforderung zur tendenziellen Entwertung nicht nur der Alltagskultur, sonder auch der Museumsarbeit darstellt. . . . Nicht nur die Hinwendung der Kleinwelten scheint erforderlich, sondern—vermehrt—die Erinnerung an die großen Struckturen, Fragen und Linien.” 40. See a nuanced treatment in Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei, eds., Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). “Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen Zwei Welten,” ibid. See also the discussion of kitsch in chapter 1. 41. Susan Crane, “Memory, History and Distortion in the Museum,” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 45. 42. Kathleen Görß, “Liebe Gäste,” DDR-Museum Tutow, http://www.ddr-museumtutow-mv.de/. 43. “MfS und Verfolgung sind nicht wichtig im Alltagsbereich.” The director is originally from the West. 44. Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig, “Wir ueber uns,” http://www.hdg.de/leipzig/ueber-uns/. 45. The Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, mostly referred to as the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung) catalogs over nine hundred memorials, most of them the result of civic initiatives, in Anna Kaminsky, ed., Orte des Erinnerns: Gedenkzeichen, Gedenkstätten und Museen zur Diktatur in SBZ und DDR (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2016). On tensions between private museums of repression and the state, see Sara Jones, The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Jenny Wüstenberg, “Transforming Berlin’s Memory: Non-State Actors and GDR Memorial Politics Today,” in David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds., Remembering the German Democratic Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011), 65–76. 46. Olga Shevchenko and Maya Nadkarni, “The Politics of Nostalgia. A Case for Comparative Analysis of Postsocialist Practices,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004): 487–519. 47. Ausstellungskonzept, DDR Museum Thale, 2013, http://www.ddr-museum-thale. de/ausstellungskonzept/index.html; “Olle DDR Daueraustellung,” Museumsbaracke “Olle DDR,” http://www.olle-ddr.de/exponate.html. 48. Jan-Werner Müller, “Just Another Vergangenheitsbewältigung? The Process of Coming to Terms with the East German Past Revisited,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 338. 49. Nikolai Vukov, “The ‘Unementionable’ and the ‘Unforgettable’: ‘Museumizing the Socialist Past in Post-1989 Bulgaria,” in Oksana Sarkisova and Peter Apor, eds.,

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums After 1989 (New York: Central European University Press, 2008). Ibid. Stefan Wolle, personal communication. Hans-Peter Freimark, personal communication. “Olle DDR Daueraustellung.” Guest Book entry 126, “Brigitte Al-Halbouni aus Magdeburg” (Dienstag, 12.10.2010), http://www.ostalgie-kabinett.de/gaestebuch.htm. These displays seldom recognize that women in the GDR often occupied both the sphere of the home and the factory. An exception to the feminine-coded quality of the museums are those few with prominent military displays, such as in Pirna. “Als Besucher sollte man aktiv und neugierig einfach alles anfassen, was einem an Exponaten zwischen die Finger kommt. Ich würde es als Berlinerin zusammenfassen mit ‘nur keine falsche Schüchternheit, immer ran an die Buletten’ . . . oder in diesem Falle halt ‘ran an die Exponate’!” Museumsnews, “Die erweiterte Ausstellung und das DDR-Restaurant Domklause sind eröffnet!” (Berlin: DDR Museum Berlin, 2010). The restaurant, however, proved financially unsuccessful and closed after five years. “A Hands on Experience of History” (Berlin: GDR Museum Berlin, 2012). Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York McGraw-Hill, 1994 [1964]), 44–47. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 117–20. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 315. On tactility and McLuhan, see especially Takeshi Kadobayashi, “Tactility, This Superflous Thing: Reading McLuhan Through the Trope of Sense,” UTCP Bulletin, no. 4 (May 2005): 26–31. Also relevant here is McLuhan’s notion of a ratio between the senses as a necessary component of rationality. Marshall McLuhan et al., The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). “Pressemappe” (Berlin: DDR Museum, 2009). Stefan Wolle, personal communication. Stefan Wolle, personal communication. Jones, The Media of Testimony. See Betts, Within Walls, part 1; and Christa Wolf, What Remains and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). Beverly James, Imagining Postcommunism: Visual Narratives of Hungary’s 1956 Revolution (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 138.

2. Collecting Communism Z 203 68. Ibid. 69. Andreas Ludwig, “Representations of the Everyday and the Making of Memory: GDR History and Museums,” in David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds., Remembering the German Democratic Republic (New York: Palgrave, 2011) and “‘Übereinstimmung,’ ‘Teilhabe’ und ‘Zufriedenheit’—die sozialistische Lebensweise,” in Andreas Ludwig, ed., Alltag: DDR. Geschichten, Fotos, Objekte (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2012). 70. See, for example, Marc-Dietrich Ohse, Jugend nach dem Mauerbau. Anpassung, Protest und Eigensinn (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2003). 71. See, for example, the exhibits described in the section “Milieus” in Andreas Ludwig, Mario Stumpfe, and Jörg Engelhardt, Alltagskultur der DDR: Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung “Tempolinsen und P2” (Berlin: Be.Bra, 1996); Ludwig, Alltag: DDR, 295–324. 72. “WAS warst und tatest DU in dieser Diktatur?” 73. Hans-Peter Freimark, personal communication. 74. In 1871, for example, there were 36 such museums, whereas by the outbreak of the First World War they had multiplied tenfold to 388. Korff, Museumsdinge. Deponieren—Exponieren: 52. By 1981 “Volks- und Heimatkunde” museums numbered around 688 in the Federal Republic, rising to 1,000 before unification, and over 2,000 by 1996. 75. Korff, Museumsdinge. 51–52. On GDR private museums as Heimat museums, see Gigerenzer, Gedächtnislabore. 76. Ibid., 55–57. 77. Jones, “(Extra)ordinary Life.” 78. See Daphne Berdahl, “Expressions of Experience and Experience of Expression: Museum Re-Presentations of GDR History,” in Matti Bunzl, ed., On the Social Life of Postsocialism. Memory, Consumption, Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 112–15. 79. As a historian, Kohl was particularly committed to these two projects, which he saw as complimentary. In 1982, before reunification even seemed remotely possible, Kohl called for a museum in Bonn that would tell the story of German postwar history, but it was not until 1989 that work on the site in Bonn began, and the doors to the museum opened in 1994, as the government was preparing to move to Berlin. The German Historical Museum (DHM), endowed with the broader mission of German history from the first century BC onwards, was announced in 1987 during divided Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations and was to occupy a new building in the west to be built near the Reichstag. In response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the DHM scrapped plans for a new building and moved into the

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80.

81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

historical building on Unter den Linden that had, until 1990, housed the East German national history museum, known as the Museum for German History (Museum für Deutsche Geschichte, or MDG). It opened for exhibitions one year later, in 1991. Of the 300 employees in the MDG at the time of unification, I was told, only 2 were kept on at the DHM. These include Parteidiktatur und Alltag in der DDR (2007), Fokus DDR (2012), Farbe für die Republik: Auftragsfotografie vom Leben in der DDR (2014), and Alltag Einheit. Porträt einer Übergangsgesellschaft (2015–16). Forum for Contemporary History, “Konzept,” in Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig (Leipzig: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2013). Jürgen Reiche, personal communication. Jürgen Reiche, personal communication. Many of the museum’s objects come from the staff (although they don’t mention this publicly), such as one family’s “West packet” or amateur vacation films from a grandparent. Sandra Starke, personal communication. “Wer kann DDR besser?” SUPERillu 50 (2013): 22–23. Most of the collection remains in storage, a sore point for the Foundation for Industry and Everyday Culture, representing the former GDR design community, who greeted the opening of the new museum with a statement condemning it as “an open misuse [Missbrauch, also abuse] of the building and the Industrial Design Collection.” Stiftung Industrie- und Alltagskulture, 2013, http://www.stiftungindustrie-alltagskultur.de/index.php?id=4. Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13–14. Thomas Lindenberger, “Die DDR nachdem das Tor zum Westen geschlossen war,” in Ludwig, Alltag: DDR. Lindenberger argues against the so-called normalisation approach associated with Mary Fulbrook; see Mary Fulbrook, ed., Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The “Normalisation of Rule”? (New York: Berghahn, 2009). Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 6.

3. UNBUILDING 1. These are the Imperial (until 1918), Weimar (1919–1933), Nazi (1933–1945), the contemporaneous cold war division into East and West (1949–1990), and the reunited German state of today.

3. Unbuilding Z 205 2. This is especially, but hardly exclusively, an issue in postsocialist settings. See William Neill, J.V., Urban Planning and Cultural Identity (New York: Routledge, 2004); Helmuth Berking, ed., Negotiating Urban Conflicts: Interaction, Space, and Control (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006); Francesca Ferguson, ed., Talking Cities: The Micropolitics of Urban Space (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2006); Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); Mark Crinson, Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (London: Routledge, 2005), and Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 3. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5. 4. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7. 5. Ibid., 7–8. 6. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). See also Michael Rothberg, “Introduction. Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire,” Yale French Studies, no. 118/119 (2010): 3–12. 7. See Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 8. Eric Santner, in his Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), eloquently examines the role of mourning and melancholia in postwar West Germany, though the East remains a curiously absent presence (for example, in his invocation of East German novelist Christa Wolf without calling attention to her provenance) in his otherwise magisterial book. 9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984). 10. See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 11. On the pathology of nostalgia as a form of Western anxiety about modernity, see Huyssen, Present Pasts and Nauman Naqvi, The Nostalgic Subject. A Genealogy of the “Critique of Nostalgia,” Working Paper 23 (Messina: Universita Degli Sudi Di Messina, 2007). 12. The total number of visitors was 60,154,205. See Anke Kuhrmann’s authoritative Der Palast der Republik: Geschichte und Bedeutung des Ost-Berliner Parlaments- und Kulturhauses (Petersberg: Imhof, 2006), 65. The GDR population at the palace’s opening in 1976 was 16,786,000 about the same as the last full year of the GDR in 1989: 16,614,000. Its highest population was the year of its birth, 1949, with

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

18,892,000 people, and it declined steadily from then on. See http://www.popul stat.info/Europe/germanec.htm. Nina Brodowski, “Geschichts(ab)riss,” in Philipp Misselwitz, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Philipp Oswalt, eds., Fun Palace 200X. Der Berliner Schlossplatz: Abriss, Neubau oder grüne Wiese? (Berlin: Martin Schmitz, 2005), 53. Schröder quoted in Thomas Beutelschmidt and Julia M Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik: Ort-Architektur-Programm (Berlin: Bauwesen, 2001), 216. For the palace supporters, see Freundeskreis Palast der Republik, “Der Palast lebt—trotz alledem,” Rundbrief für die Mitglieder und Sympathisanten des Freundeskreises, no. 1 (2009). On the range of civil society groups, see Fabian Reinbold and Mirjam Novak, “Leidenschaftliche Kämpfer: Die Abrissdebatte und ihre Akteure,” in Alexander Schug, ed., Palast der Republik: Politischer Diskurs und private Erinnerung (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007). By the mid-1970s, both German states had implicitly, then explicitly, recognized each other’s existence. West Germany gave up long-held opposition to international recognition of the GDR with the reasoning that direct confrontation would only strengthen the GDR regime while cooperation would weaken it. To this end, the very words German Nation were literally struck from the 1974 GDR constitution, and references to “Germany” replaced by “GDR” wherever possible. For example, the German Academy of Science became the Academy of Science of the GDR and West German literature became classified as “foreign.” See Stefan Willer, “Politik der Aneignung: Die ‘Erbetheorie’ in den ‘Weimarer Beiträgen’ der siebziger Jahre,” Weimarer Beiträge 51, no. 1 (2005): 44–64. On the history and origin of the German Volkshaus and its trajectory in the GDR, see Horst Groschopp, “Kulturhäuser in der DDR: Vorläufer, Konzepte, Gebrauch. Versuch einer historischen Rekonstruktion,” in Thomas Ruben and Bernd Wagner, eds., Kulturhäuser in Brandenburg (Potsdam: Brandenburger Texte zu Kunst und Kultur, 1994); Simone Hain, “Das Volkshaus der DDR. Zur Entwurfsgeschichte und Funktionsbestimmung,” in Beutelschmidt and Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik; Christine Meyer, Kulturpaläste und Stadthallen der DDR (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 2005). On the shift in the Soviet Union to a rigid ideological approach to cultural palaces, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “The Shaping of Soviet Worker’s Leisure: Workers’ Clubs and Palaces of Culture in the 1930s,” International Labor and Working Class History 56 (1999): 78–92. However, countered other party officials, “So long as we do not offer anything better than imported dances, our people will dance the Twist whether we want it or not!” Cited in Groschopp, “Kulturhäuser in der DDR,” 37. GDR debt rose from less than 1 billion dollars in 1970 to over 12 billion in 1981. See Mary Lavinge, International Political Economy and Socialism (Cambridge:

3. Unbuilding Z 207 Cambridge University Press, 1991), 324. On this period, see Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), and her edited volume Power and Society in the GDR, 1961– 1979: The “Normalisation of Rule”? (New York: Berghahn, 2009). For a fascinating look at how this period changed the built environment by adapting modernist housing principles, see Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 20. Peter Müller, “Counter-Architecture and Building Race: Cold War Politics and the Two Berlins,” GHI Bulletin Supplement 2 (2005): 103. The plan Ulbricht favored was by Helmut Hennig. The story of the Central Building and the postwar redesign of East Berlin’s center, including the Television Tower and Alexanderplatz, is fascinating and deserves its own treatment. On the history of the Central Building, see Bruno Flierl, “Planung und Bau des Palastes,” in Beutelschmidt and Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik, 54–75; Juan Jose Gomez Gutierrez, “Building Homes, Building Politics: Berlin’s Postwar Urban Development and Ideology,” Central Europe Review 1, no. 21 (1999), http://www.ce-review.org/99/21/ gomez21.html; Klaus von Beyme, “Ideas for a Capital City in East and West,” in Thorsten Scheer, Josef Paul Kleihues, and Paul Kahlfeldt, eds., City of Architecture, Architecture of the City: Berlin 1900–2000 (Berlin: Nicolaische, 2000), 247; and Kuhrmann, Der Palast der Republik. Had Ulbricht succeeded in building his skyscraper, its legacy might have been similar to Warsaw’s Palace of Culture, as vividly described in Michał Murawski’s Palace Complex: The Social Life of a Stalinist Skyscraper in a Capitalist City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 21. Flierl, “Planung und Bau des Palastes.” 22. This calculation lay less in overt symbolism than in mundane considerations; Honecker was reportedly sentimentally attached to the landscaping for the 1973 World Festival of Youth that covered the space where Ulbricht had dreamed of a skyscraper, and in any case the parades had been relocated to Karl Marx Allee, leaving the square even more desolate. Yet the symbolism was powerful indeed, and in his speeches Honecker presented the palace as part of the GDR inheritance of German socialist revolution, completing the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1918. This narrative of inheritance linked the erstwhile Soviet satellite, founded out of defeat and occupation, to a grander tradition of autonomy, active attempts at self-liberation, and genuine revolution. It was also a double narrative of redemption: one unspoken, dealing with the awkwardness of the country of Marx being the vassal of the Soviet Union, and one outspoken, the mythic telos in which all German socialist traditions led to the “Socialist Unity Party” of the GDR. This “unity” sought to redeem German socialism from its bitter, self-defeating interwar

208 Y 3. Unbuilding

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

feuds that allowed the Nazis to divide and conquer. The importance of this narrative manifested itself materially in the only part of the Prussian castle to be preserved and integrated into the nearby State Council Building (Staatsratsgebäude)—the portal containing the balcony from which Karl Liebknecht in 1918 pronounced the (failed) Free Socialist Republic and claimed the castle “for the German people.” See Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 205. This is not without irony, since Honecker himself had been an opportunistic hardliner in the late 1960s, and Ulbricht had been more open to reform in the early 1960s. See Fulbrook, The People’s State. From a draft plan of May 24, 1973, in Hain, “Das Volkshaus der DDR,” 79. Ibid., 84. As one example of this, Josie McLellan writes how the portrayal of nude bathers in the central painting in the famous palace art exhibit entitled “Are Communists Allowed to Dream?” was part of a reconfiguring of official discourse that shifted the party line from viewing nudism as “indelibly associated with Nazism, social democracy, and moral decay” to “a symbol of a young, forward-looking East Germany.” Josie McLellan, “State Socialist Bodies: East German Nudism from Ban to Boom,” Journal of Modern History 79 (2007): 76. See Otakar Macel, “Post-war Modern Architecture in the Former Eastern Bloc,” in Hubert-Jan Henkert and Hilde Heynen, eds., Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement (Rotterdam: 010, 2002), 111. On Stalinist architecture, see Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: AvantGarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Kenneth Frampton in Kuhrmann, Der Palast der Republik, 176. The lantern effect was perhaps a purposeful reference by chief architect Graffunder to the Weimar expressionist Bruno Taut’s call for “crystalline People’s Houses glowing in colors under the starry firmament.” See Heinz Graffunder, Martin Beerbaum, and Gerhard Murza, Der Palast der Republik (Leipzig: Seemann, 1977); Hain, “Das Volkshaus der DDR,” 84. See Kuhrmann, Der Palast der Republik, 125, 43. On modernism in GDR architecture, see also Thomas Hoscislawski, Bauen zwischen Macht und Ohnmacht: Architektur und Städtebau in der DDR (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1991). Hain, “Das Volkshaus der DDR.” Stefan Wolle, “Der Palast als Gesamtkunstwerk. Oder: Das Gleichnis vom Penny,” in Beutelschmidt and Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik, 185. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 187.

3. Unbuilding Z 209 33. Andreas Ulrich, Palast der Republik: ein Rückblick = A retrospective (Munich: Prestel, 2006); Lara Kneisler, “Die ‘erträumte DDR’—der Palast der Republik als Kulturstandort,” in Schug, Palast der Republik, 264. 34. Rudolf Ellereit, “93 Prozent Kultur,” in Kirsten Heidler and Ingetraud Skirecki, eds., Von Erichs Lampenladen zur Asbestruine: alles über den Palast der Republik (Berlin: Argon, 1998), 174. 35. Cited in Schug, Palast der Republik. 36. The asbestos contamination was a widely seen in the East as a political pretext for closing and demolishing the palace. Ironically, perhaps, the asbestos itself came from the United Kingdom. See Werner Heinitz and Bernd Schöll, “Asbest—vom Baustoff zum Gefahrstoff. Sanierungsmaßnahmen,” in Beutelschmidt and Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik. 37. Freundeskreis Palast der Republik, “Der Palast lebt—trotz alledem.” The quotes come from their 2009 exhibit, but they have been active since the palace closed with campaigns, events, and exhibits to condemn the decision to demolish the palace and preserve its memory. 38. See Santner, Stranded Objects; see also Huyssen, Present Pasts. 39. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7. 40. Sonia Thiel, “Asbest und der Palast—Ein Diskursmotiv und seine Karriere” in Schug, Palast der Republik, 136–43. 41. The depot contains only a selection of items deemed notable by the preservation teams. Many items were auctioned to raise cash. Contemporary art from the galleries, including the standing exhibit entitled “Can Communists Dream,” lives in storage in the German Historical Museum. See Christiane Oehmig, “Der ausgelagerte Palast,” in Beutelschmidt and Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik. 42. Quoted in Schug, Palast der Republik, 288. 43. Hartmut Böhme, “Die Ästhetik der Ruinen,” in Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, eds., Der Schein des Schönen (Göttingen: Steidl Gerhard, 1989), 288. 44. Hermine G. de Soto, “(Re)Inventing Berlin: Dialectics of Power, Symbols, and Pasts, 1990–1995,” City and Society 8, no. 1 (1996): 29–49. 45. Wolf Jobst Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin—Berlin war das Schloss,” in Abschied von Preußen (Berlin: Siedler, 1991), 122–37. 46. Goerd Peschken, “Wer hat Angst vor dem Berliner Schloß?,” Ästhetik & Kommunikation 32, no. 114 (2001): 28. 47. Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin.” 48. Wilhelm von Boddien, “Das Antlitz Berlins: Stadtschlossausstellung,” in Heidler and Skirecki, Von Erichs Lampenladen, 195–96. 49. Marc Schüffner, “Public Remarks on Rebuilding the Berlin Castle,” CDU Ortsleitung Wannsee, www.cdusz.de/nachrichten/200511142119351.pdf.

210 Y 3. Unbuilding 50. Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin.” 51. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14, 15. 52. Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin” referring to the ideal city plans of Ludwig Hilbersheimer. 53. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Architects’ Debate,” History and Memory 9, no. 1 (1997): 189–225. 54. Ironically the beginning of the debate, as Rosenfeld (193) traces it, emerged from criticism of James Stirling’s 1977 winning entry for the state art museum in Stuttgart, which modernists critiqued as fascist. 55. Cited in Rosenfeld, “The Architects’ Debate,” 203. 56. Ibid., 206. 57. On the historians’ debate, see James Knowlton and Truett Cates, eds., Forever in Hitler’s Shadow? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1993); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also the discussion in Santner, Stranded Objects. 58. During the Nazi years, the castle was used for backdrops and staging of certain important events, most notably the 1936 Olympic opening ceremonies, and the adjacent Lustgarten Square featured prominently in Nazi rallies. Yet, compared with a wide variety of other sites in Berlin, the castle was significantly “unburdened” of direct association with the Nazi years. The castle is attractive as a site for national rejuvenation precisely because it played little role in Nazi crimes and Hitler was known to dislike it. 59. Cited in in Andreas Tzortzis, “Berlin’s Master Builder Retires,” New York Times, September 27, 2006. 60. Ibid. 61. The quotes in this paragraph are from Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 46–47, 56. See also Josef Paul Kleihues, Ausgewählte Texte (Berlin: Internationale Bauakademie Berlin, 2004); and Harald Bodenschatz et al., Berlin und seine Bauten: Städtebau (Berlin: DOM, 2009). For the city planning that draws on the black plan, see Planwerk Innenstadt (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 1999). 62. Rossi’s criticism is presented in Rosenfeld, “The Architects Debate,” 218. 63. Thus Stimmann quoted in Till, The New Berlin, 46. 64. Von Boddien, “Das Antlitz Berlins,” 196. 65. Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin” (emphasis added).

3. Unbuilding Z 211 66. Siedler puts it directly “The question of the rebuilding of the Castle is not so much about the Castle than about the classic center of Berlin. . . . The point is less a single edifice . . . then the city image.” Ibid. 67. The original concept proposed an optical illusion where, as a viewer walked by, images would alternate between the prewar castle, the castle in ruins, and the Palace of the Republic. Peschken, “Wer hat Angst vor dem Berliner Schloß?” 68. See the exhibit catalog Förderverein Berliner Schloss, Ausstellungskatalog der Ausstellung “Das Schloss?” (Berlin: Ernst, 1994). 69. Reinbold and Novak, “Leidenschaftliche Kämpfer.” 70. Rosenfeld, “The Architects’ Debate,” 207. 71. Ibid., 197. 72. Wilhelm von Boddien, “Totally Destroyed and Newly Rebuilt Buildings,” Förderverein Berliner Schloss e.V., 2009, http://www.berliner-schloss.de. In a similar vein, city planner and architect Barbara Jakubeit likened architectural plans to a republishable book or a music score by asking, “What makes the art of architecture so precious that if its score still exists it can’t be reproduced?” From an interview in Michael Z. Wise, Capital Dilemma: Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 117–18. Also cited in Didem Ekici, “The Surfaces of Memory in Berlin: Rebuilding the Schloss,” Journal of Architectural Education (2007): 32. 73. Ekici, “The Surfaces of Memory,” 32; von Boddien “Totally Destroyed.” 74. Ekici, “The Surfaces of Memory,” 33. 75. Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin.” 76. Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 19. 77. Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate,” History and Memory 9, no. 1 (1997): 90. 78. See Maier, The Unmasterable Past. 79. On the question of Prussia laying the groundwork for the fascist era, see Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Gordon A. Craig’s classic The Politics of the Prussian Army: 1640–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Two standard works on Prussian history differ primarily in their emphasis: on militarism in Sebastian Haffner, The Rise and Fall of Prussia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); and on culture in Christopher M. Clarke, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). The GDR, of course, had its own turn toward Prussia in an attempt to cement its legitimacy. Especially in regard to memory culture, see the discussion of Prussia in Jon Berndt Olsen,

212 Y 3. Unbuilding

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 137–82. See also Jan Herman Brinks, Paradigms of Political Change. Luther, Frederick II, and Bismarck: The GDR on Its Way to Unity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001); and Alan Nothnagle, “From Buchenwald to Bismarck: Historical Myth-Building in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989,” Central European History 26, no. 1 (1993): 91–113. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory.” German History 22, no. 4 (2004): 505. Koshar, From Monuments to Traces, 25. Rosenfeld, “A Mastered Past?” 526. Golo Mann cited in Saul Friedländer, “Some German Struggles with Memory,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 33. The castle was by no means the only building of this sort. Others included the Bauakadamie (Building academy) and the Alte Kommandantur (Old headquarters) in Berlin and the Garnison Church in Potsdam. See Rosenfeld, “A Mastered Past?” 525. See the Humboldt Forum (http://www.humboldt-forum.de/). See also Thomas Flierl and Hermann Parzinger, eds., Humboldt-Forum Berlin: Das Projekt/The Project (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009); and Internationale Bauakademie Berlin, ed., Humboldt-Forum: Symposium zu Fragen der Rekonstruktion und der räumlichen Konzeption des Berliner Schlosses (Berlin: Internationale Bauakademie Berlin, 2004). Deutscher Bundestag, “Antrag: Wiederherstellung der historischen Mitte Berlins” (Deutscher Bundestag, 2002). Ibid. Neill, Urban Planning and Cultural Identity, 105, citing Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Alexandertechnik, “Der Anti Humboldt” (2009), http://www.humboldtforum. info/. As quoted in Gerwin Zohlen, “Verfassungsplatz und Platz der Nation. Zum Schlossplatz in Berlin,” in Beutelschmidt and Novak, Ein Palast und seine Republik, 194. Siedler, “Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin.” Barthes, Mythologies. Quoted in Rosenfeld, “The Architects’ Debate,” 211. See Brodowski, “Geschichts(ab)riss.” See Schug, Palast der Republik, 250. The research group Urban Catalyst had first proposed temporary use of the palace for cultural events in 2002 with a feasibility study and a well-attended exhibit in

3. Unbuilding Z 213

97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

the neighboring State Council building. The Wagner Complex performance was part of their hard-fought efforts, but the Xian warrior exhibit was, in their estimation, a “Trojan horse” designed to signal the federal government’s preference for “a commercial enterprise without cultural and political ambitions.” By contrast, McKinsey’s use of the palace was in exchange for financially supporting cultural programming. Philipp Oswalt, Klaus Overmeyer, and Philipp Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst: Mit Zwischennutzungen Stadt entwickeln (Berlin: Dom, 2013), 292. On the globalization of Berlin’s cultural capital, see Claire Colomb, “Requiem for a Lost Palast: ‘Revanchist Urban Planning’ and ‘Burdened Landscapes’ of the German Democratic Republic in the New Berlin,” Planning Perspectives, no. 22 (2007): 283– 323; Huyssen, Present Pasts; Nikolaus Hirsch, “Brauchen wir “Bauwerke, zur Vereinigung der Völker erbaut”?,” in Misselwitz, Obrist, and Oswalt, Fun Palace 200X. See “Antrag: Die Mitte der Spreeinsel als offenes Bürgerforum gestalten,” (Deutscher Bundestag, 2002). Berlin State Senator for Science, Research and Culture, Adrienne Goehler (Coalition 90/Green Party), pushed for the idea in the government. Amelie Deuflhard and Philipp Oswalt, “The Making of Volkspalast,” in Amelie Deuflhard and Sophie Krempl-Klieeisen, eds., Volkspalast. Zwischen Aktivismus und Kunst (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006), 41. Florian Waldvogel, “Volksballast oder Ort Kultureller Produktion,” ibid. See Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality (New York: Berg, 2005). Waldvogel, “Volksballast.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). In Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, Spaces of Uncertainty (Wuppertal: Müller & Busmann, 2002), 63. The name of the association, ZwischenPalastNutzung, plays on the German term for temporary use (Zwischennutzung) by sandwiching the word palace in between the component words for “temporary” and “use.” Julia M. Novak, Thomas Beutelschmidt, and Joseph Hoppe, “Palast-Parcours— Abriss der Geschichte,” in Deuflhard and Krempl-Klieeisen, Volkspalast, 28. The original steering committee consisted of Amelie Deuflhard from the Sophiensäle Theater, Philipp Oswalt from Studio Urban Catalyst, Jörn Weisbrodt from the State Opera Unter den Linden, Joseph Hoppe from the German Technical Museum of Berlin, and the attorney Eberhard Rhein, led by the architect Stefan Rethfeld. The association was designed as a network with diverse and changing partners over the course of its existence. The idea for temporary use was connected to a larger movement in the 2000s in architecture and urban planning championing

214 Y 3. Unbuilding

106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

111.

112. 113.

114. 115. 116.

the idea of temporary use of urban space in postindustrial cities as a reflection of the changing nature of economy and society in the built environment, with a pronounced emphasis on the creative economy. See the essays in Oswalt, Overmeyer, and Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst; Klaus Overmayer, Urban Pioneers: Temporary Use and Urban Development in Berlin (Berlin: Jovis, 2007); and Florian Haydn and Robert Temel, eds., Temporary Urban Spaces: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006). Misselwitz, Obrist, and Oswalt, Fun Palace 200X, 137. Sophie Krempl-Klieeisen, “Volkspalast. Was tragen sie zur Demokratie?” in Deuflhard and Krempl-Klieeisen, Volkspalast, 56. Rem Koolhas, “Architektur soll keine Werte verkörpern, sondern den Nutzen des Gebäudes”—Ein Geschpräch mit Miriam Böttger,” ibid., 186. Sindy Duong, “Zwischennutzung im Palast der Republik. Ein Kreativfeld ohne ideologische Interessen?” in Schug, Palast der Republik, 124. Berlin cultural senator Thomas Flierl played the key role in moving the project forward within the government. See Oswalt, Overmeyer, and Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst, 294. On Price’s architectural ideas, see Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Re: CP by Cedric Price (Cambridge, MA: Birkhäuser, 2003). On Price’s relation to the Palace, see Misselwitz, Obrist, and Oswalt, Fun Palace 200X. The Volkspalast, under the direction of Amelie Deuflhard, Matthias Lilienthal and Philipp Oswalt, was a condensed version of an earlier concept for temporary use of the palace originally under the project title “1,000 Days.” It ran in two incarnations over two summers in 2004 and 2005. For an overview of the main events, see Deuflhard and Krempl-Klieeisen, Volkspalast. For an overview of the various phases of the project see Oswalt, Overmeyer, and Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst, 288–303. See also Zwischennutzung Palast der Republik (Berlin: ZwischenPalastNutzung), June 21, 2004. See also Zwischennutzung des Palast der Republik: Bilanz einer Transformation 2003 (Berlin: ZwischenPalastNutzung and Bündnis für den Palast in cooperation with Urban Catalyst, 2005). Deuflhard and Krempl-Klieeisen, Volkspalast, 47. Lars Ramberg’s project was not formally part of the Volkspalast. “Am liebsten hätten wir ihn zum Abschluss gesprengt,” “Supernova,” Lichtproduktionsgenossenschaft LPG, 2004, http://www.lichtproduktionsgenossen schaft.de/html/supernova.html. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 51. ZwischenPalastNutzung, “1000 Tage,” in Deuflhard and Krempl-Klieeisen, Volkspalast. LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate,” 98.

3. Unbuilding Z 215 117. ZwischenPalastNutzung, “Chance,” http://www.zwischenpalastnutzung.de/. A sign of the Volkspalast’s success on its own terms were the protests against the demolition and plans to build the castle in late summer 2006, when, “unlike the early 1990s, this protest movement was carried out by a younger generation, mostly from western Germany. They knew the building primarily through its temporary use and regarded the structure as an important contemporary witness, as a symbol for the new Berlin and united Germany in all its ambivalence.” Oswalt, Overmeyer, and Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst, 298. 118. Bruno Flierl, “Zur Neuaneignung Des Areals Mitte—Spreeinsel Berlin.” In Misselwitz, Obrist, and Oswalt, Fun Palace 200X, 165. The Volkspalast organizers themselves recognized how “a weakness of the Berg project was that it was a formal and therefore primarily aesthetic intervention at a moment when, in light of the impending demolition, a stronger politicization and thematicization of the future of the site would have been desirable.” Nonetheless, they note, the Volkspalast had changed the way the public viewed the site from a GDR legacy to a “laboratory for contemporary cultural production” that compelled “aesthetic, cultural and political reflection on the extremely ambivalent process of German unification.” Oswalt, Overmeyer, and Misselwitz, Urban Catalyst, 297–98. 119. Der Rückbau (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2006), http://www. stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/bauen/palast_rueckbau/. For a webcam showing the progress month by month between April 2006 and December 2008, see http:// www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de / bauen / palast_rueckbau/video_flash/index. shtml. 120. Reflecting on the palace’s steel in the Burj Khalifa, Alexander Kluge remarked, “Herculaneum was not only buried under lava. It was also hidden in the tallest tower in Dubai.” “Der Angriff der 13. Fee,” Der Freitag Online, December 24, 2009. See also Thomas Loy, “Resteverwertung: Der Palast der Republik lebt weiter—in Einzelteilen” Der Tagespiegel Online, November 18, 2012. 121. Jean-Louis Cohen, “Das Schloss? Roundtable on the Reconstruction of the Berlin Royal Palace,” New York University, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and Deutsches Haus, 2008. 122. Friedrich von Bose, “The Making of Berlin’s Humboldt-Forum: Negotiating History and the Cultural Politics of Place” Dark Matter, no.11 (2013), www.darkmat ter101.org. 123. Cohen, “Das Schloss?” 124. The Humboldt Forum is the subject for a book of its own. For a critique of how the Humboldt Forum romanticizes the concept of Bildung, see Sean Franzel, “Recycling Bildung: From the Humboldt-Forum to Humboldt and Back,”

216 Y 3. Unbuilding

125. 126.

127.

128.

Seminar 50, no. 3 (2014): 379–97. See also the critique in von Bose, “The Making of Berlin’s Humboldt-Forum”; Larissa Förster, “Nichts Gewagt, Nichts Gewonnen: Die Ausstellung ‘Anders zur Welt kommen. Das Humboldt-Forum im Schloß. Ein Werkstattblick,’ ” Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, no. 56 (2010): 241– 61; and Nina Brodowski, “Provincializing Humboldt, Der Diskurs um den Berliner Schlossplatz als gesellschaftspolitischer Gradmesser,” Polar: Politik/Theorie/ Alltag, no. 12 (2013), http://www.polar-zeitschrift.de. Freundeskreis Palast der Republik, “Presseinformation zur Wanderausstellung des Freundeskreises Palast der Republik” (2016). See Marion Pfaus, Rückbau 21, http://www.rueckbau21.de. “No Castle in My Name” has an archive of debates about the castle available at http://schlossde batte.de. “Temporäre Freiraumgestaltung Schlossareal: Ergebnisprotokoll,” Berlin: Senats verwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, September 22, 2006. See images from the project at http://www.relaisla.de/relaishome/html/projekte/89/pro.html. The piece was entitled “Na, Bravo (Encore),” Ton Spur 30, http://berlin.tonspur. at/b_30.html.

4. THE WALL AFTER THE WALL 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 2. Paul Ricouer, Memory, History Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 57. 3. The focus here is on the material space of the wall rather than the discursive representations, specifically the former inner-city border itself. 4. Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Hygiene, CO: Eridanos, 1987 [1936]). 5. On the concept of the edge of vanishing, see Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65. 6. Jonathan Bach, “Memory Landscapes and the Labor of the Negative in Berlin,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26, no. 1 (2013); Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 [1807]). 7. They won only the right in 1996 to buy back their own property from the federal government at a 75 percent discount on its current value.

4. The Wall After the Wall Z 217 8. On critical reconstruction, see Alexander Tölle, “Urban Identity Policies in Berlin: From Critical Reconstruction to Reconstructing the Wall,” Cities 27, no. 5 (2010): 348–57; Virag Molnar, “The Cultural Production of Locality: Reclaiming the ‘European City’ in Post-Wall Berlin,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 2 (2010): 281–309; Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Naralle Hohensee, “Reinventing Traditionalism: The Influence of Critical Reconstruction on the Shape of Berlin’s Friedrichstadt,” Intersections 11, no. 1 (2010): 55–99. 9. Carolyn Loeb, “Planning Reunification: The Planning History of the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” Planning Perspectives 21 (2006): 78. 10. Sebastian Richter, “Die Mauer in der deutschen Errinerungskultur,” in KlausDietmar Henke, ed., Die Mauer: Errichtung, Überwindung, Errinerung (Berlin: DTV, 2011), 252–66. Berlin was in the national eye more than usual that summer as well, because the Federal Parliament had formally moved there from Bonn just two years earlier, and one of the major new parliament office buildings opened with great fanfare a few weeks before the August 13 anniversary. 11. Christian Bommarius, “Losungsworte der Geschichte,” Berliner Zeitung, November 8, 2001. 12. The museum was originally located in Bernauer Strasse in 1962. It moved to Friederichstrasse (Checkpoint Charlie) in 1963. 13. The land’s owner was a bank stock corporation from the western German city of Hamm. 14. Nils-Viktor Sorge, “Das Kreuz mit den Kreuzen,” Stern (2005); Jana Sittnick, “Die Frau meint es ernst,” Die Tageszeitung, October 30, 2004. 15. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Marie Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989 (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2011). 16. Sittnick, “Die Frau meint es ernst.” 17. Ibid. 18. Billed as a “temporary” art event, Hildebrandt and her supporters sought to turn the memorial into something permanent, going to court for an extension. After losing in court, the land’s owner asked the city of Berlin to remove them. 19. Johannes Gernert, “Die Kreuzritter vom Checkpoint,” Die Tageszeitung, July 6, 2005, 5. 20. The role of virtual media in turning site into sight has become ever more central to absorbing, organizing, conceptualizing, and controlling the plural sites that make up the Berlin Wall. The unintentional isomorphism between the wall’s distributed remains, the concept, and the structure of a Web site, has made the wall

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21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

particularly adaptable for apps and virtual mobile guides. See, for example, the city of Berlin’s smart phone app: http://www.berlin.de/mauer/wo-war-die-mauer/app .en.html. A different variation is the increasing use of virtual 3-D imagery to convey the wall, for example http://www.twinity.com/en/community/berlin-wall. This raises intriguing questions about authenticity, material fidelity, and indexicality that deserve full treatment. Thanks to Franziska Koenig-Paratore for her insightful comments. Thomas Flierl, Gesamtkonzept zur Erinnerung an die Berliner Mauer: Dokumentation, Information und Gedenken (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, 2006). The green spaces were Nordbahnhof, the Mauerpark, and a bicycle/nature path along the perimeter of the wall on the outskirts of the city. Flierl, “Gesamtkonzept,” 15. Axel Klausmeier and Leo Schmidt, “Mauerrelikte,” in Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ed., Die Mauer: Errichtung, Überwindung, Erinnerung (Berlin: DTV, 2011), 342–54. Aleida Assmann, Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 224. Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 57–81. James E. Young, “The Counter-monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 273. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Roann Barris, “Architectures of Memory and Counter-Memory: Berlin and Bucharest,” conference paper presented at the Ralph and Ruth Fisher Forum: Interpreting Emotion in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, June 19–21, 2008, 6. The competition was announced in 1994, and Kohloff and Kohloff ’s entry was one of two second prizes—there was no first prize. It was eventually chosen and unveiled in 1998. Sybille Frank, Der Mauer um die Wette gedenken: Die Formation einer HeritageIndustrie am Berliner Checkpoint Charlie (Frankfurt: Campus, 2009). Christina Brüning, “Keine Einigung im Streit über Berliner Checkpoint Charlie,” Berliner Morgenpost, July 22, 2012. Christoph Stollowsky, “Mauermuseum: Ort mit starker Symbolkraft—und nicht unumstritten,” Der Tagesspiegel, December 12, 2013. The concept diplomatically finesses the admittedly “difficult relation” between the senate and Hildebrandt’s museum by including the museum as an original part of the memory landscape of

4. The Wall After the Wall Z 219

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

the site, allowing it to be incorporated in its idiosyncratic form into the larger context. This was an advertisement for the Association of German Foundations, headquartered in the building. Franz Thiel, “‘Ohne Titel,’ ” in Kunst im Stadtraum: 21 Kunstprojekte im Berliner Stadtraum (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2002), 22–23. Jeffrey Jurgens, “‘A Wall Victim from the West’: Migration, German Division, and Multidirectional Memory in Kreuzberg,” Transit 8, no. 2 (2013): 19, http://eschol arship.org/uc/item/6q4418kk. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). The advertising firm, legally entitled to use the space, was forced to make do with income from residuals. Künstlerinitiative East Side Gallery, “East Side Gallery Berlin,” Künstlerinitiative East Side Gallery, e.v., http://www.eastsidegallery-berlin.de. Taussig, Defacement, 52. Hendrik Lakeberg, “Squat and Reload: Ben De Biel,” Sound of Berlin (2012), http://soundofberlin.net/ben-de-biel/portrait-squat-reload.html. There had also been a shorter-lived wagon settlement at Potsdamer Platz in the early 1990s. “Alptraum im Niemandsland,” Der Spiegel, no. 21 (1996): 146–47. Martin Henselmann, “Wem gehört die Stadt,” Das Freischüssler, no. 3 (1999), http://akj.rewi.hu-berlin.de/alt/zeitung/99/3/18a.htm. 35.5 percent for the Greens, 20.8 percent for the Social Democrats, 14.3 percent for the Pirates, and 12.5 percent for the Left Party. See http://www.xhain.info/wahl2011/. Axel Klausmeier, personal communication, May 8, 2013. Matt Shea, “Berliners Are Fighting a War Against Hipster-Led Gentrification,” Vice. com, April 5, 2013, http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/berlins-war-against-gentrification. “Save Berlin: The Cranes Are Back!,” ExBerliner, April 22, 2013. “Deckname ‘Jens Peter’: Bauherr der East Side Gallery war IM der Stasi,” Spiegel Online, November 16, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/east-side-gallerybauherr-hinkel-war-im-der-stasi-a-933975.html. The Berlin Wall Foundation had long wanted jurisdiction over the site, yet when it finally achieved that goal, it remained unclear what form of preservation was possible or desirable due both to the lack of funds and differing perspectives. Susan Leigh Star, “This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, no. 35 (2010): 601–17.

220 Y 4. The Wall After the Wall 52. As opposed, for example, to the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, or the Topography or Terror, where the wall appears in the context of other histories. 53. Hope M. Harrison, “The Berlin Wall and Its Resurrection as a Site of Memory,” German Politics and Society 29, no. 2 (2011): 78–106; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 54. Brigitte Sion, Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires: Balancing Memory, Architecture, and Tourism (New York: Lexington, 2014). 55. B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). 56. Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling, “Sacking Berlin,” The Baffler, no. 23. (2013), http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/sacking-berlin; Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (London: Routledge, 2012). 57. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007). 58. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

EPILOGUE 1. On intergenerational transmission through inheritance, see Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). On theorizing inheritance, see also Stefan Willer, Erbf älle: Theorie und Praxis kultureller Übertragung in der Moderne (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014). 2. For Bataille, “if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” In Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1: Consumption, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Zone, 1998), 21. 3. This is a notable difference from how the market and accumulation is more often regarded, from Karl Marx and Georg Simmel to today, as primarily a sphere of alienation from experience rather than a means by which cultural knowledge is preserved, circulated, and transmitted across generations. 4. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 45. 5. Ibid., 37–38.

Epilogue: Exit Ghost Z 221 6. Santner identifies the oscillation between terms of the double bind as a “paradoxic ritual or auratic de-auraticization” that leads to repetition rather than transition. See ibid., 126. On multidirectional memory, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 7. Santner, Stranded Objects, 36. 8. In January 1990 the scholar Leonore Lieblein recounted an interview with Müller’s dramaturge Alexander Weigel on this point. “When I ask whether recent political events have changed his view of the play, he says no, especially since he and Müller have never felt that the play is saying only one thing. But he acknowledges that the audience will have changed and may see the same things differently.” See Leonore Lieblein, “East Berlin Theater Diary,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7, no. 1 (1991): 120–21. 9. “The poem suggests” writes Barnett, “that Germany has never really known how to act in the face of historical dilemmas, and anticipates the failure of the revolution in 1848.” David Barnett, “Resisting the Revolution: Heiner Müller’s Hamlet/ Machine at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, March 1990,” Theater Research International 31, no. 2 (2006): 189. Müller used the quote as an inscription for Robert Wilson’s 1986 production in New York and Hamburg. The poem is by Ferdinand Freiligrath. 10. Santner, Stranded Objects, 46. 11. “Offener Brief der Vertrauensleute des ‘Deutschen Theaters’ an den Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl (November 1989),” http://www.ddr89.de/ddr89/texte/briefe9. html. 12. Ibid. 13. Author’s interview with Romy Weyrauch and Martin Zepter, Berlin, May 25, 2015. All translations mine. 14. Ibid. 15. See, among others, Matthias Matussek, “Requiem für einen Staat,” Der Spiegel, March 26, 1990, 290. 16. The term Third Generation East refers generally to those from the former East who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s. See Michael Hacker et al., eds., Dritte Generation Ost: Wer wir sind, was wir wollen (Berlin: Christoph Links), 2012. 17. 1989 [Exit Ghost], act I, scene 2. Unpublished MS. All translations mine. 18. 1989 [Exit Ghost], act I, scene 3. 19. Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002). See, among others, also Sabina Rennefanz, Eisenkinder: Die stille Wut der Wendegeneration

222 Y Epilogue: Exit Ghost

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

(Munich: Lüchterhand, 2013). On 1968 and the Third Generation East, see, among others, Hans-Joachim Maaz, “Ihr könnt die 68er des Ostens sein,” Die Zeit, January 10, 2013, http://www.zeit.de/2013/03/Wendekinder-Hans-Joachim-Maaz. Thomas Schubert, “Alles nur Theater? Die ‘Dritte Generation Ost’ betritt die Bühne,” unpublished MS. Koga, Inheritance of Loss. 1989 [Exit Ghost], act 1, scene 5. Original: “Ich stand an der Küste und sprach mit der Brandung BLABLA.” Heiner Müller, Die Hamletmaschine. 1989 [Exit Ghost], act 1, scene 2; Act 2, scenes 3 and 4. Interview. 1989 [Exit Ghost], act 3, scenes 1 and 2. Ibid., scene 6. Schubert, “Alles nur Theater?” Dominic Pettman, “A Break in Transmission: Art, Appropriation, and Accumulation,” Genre 34, nos. 3–4 (2001): 279–90.

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INDEX

Abgrenzung (disconnection), 95–96 Absence, 7; architecture defined by, 91; of Berlin Wall, 141; imagination related to, 120; labor of the negative and, 140; in memory sites, 140; as palpable, 111. See also Present absence Absent presence, 106–10, 205n8 Aestheticization, 28, 120, 158 Alltag. See Everyday life Ambiguity: between absence and presence, 140; inheritance containing, 172; as source of strength for parody, 36; of Stasi in everyday life, 77; in urban design, 123 Ampelmann, 43 Anti-Humboldt, 133 Antipolitics: of memory, 62–66; museums as form of, 48, 65; of objects, 68 Anti-Stalinist Action Berlin Normannenstrasse (ASTAK), 64 Apolda Museum (Museumsbaracke Olle DDR), 59, 61, 65, 68, 199n26 Apolitical spaces, 47, 65, 73; as category of worth, 81; as expression of authenticity, 67–68

Appropriation, 3, 7–10, 48, 129, 140, 182, 190n20; of Berlin Wall, 141; commodification and, 8–10; of East Side Gallery, 168; evoking forms of, 92; excess extracted through, 172; of GDR products, 29; as insensitive, 79; as ironic, 15, 37; melancholia, elegiac inheritance and, 93; memory through, 7; in museums, 48, 89; new value created by, 172; for Palace of the Republic, 122–23, 172; of performative inheritance, 93; as practice of inheritance, 171; of ruins, 120–23; as rupture with tradition, 182 Arab Spring, 12 Architects’ debate, 109, 130. See also Historians’ debate Architecture: absence defining, 91; anti-architecture, 124; as expression of the nation, 98, 119; historical meaning influencing, 109; of Honecker, 98; of Humboldt Forum, 130; modernist principles of, 99; of Palace of the Republic, 97–100; postmodernism invoked by, 113; postwar critique of,

246 Y Index Architecture (cont.) 108; in reunified Berlin, 92; temporality of trauma captured by, 150. See also Temporary use Archivization, 105 Aristotle, 122 Asisi, Yadegar, 158, 159 ASTAK. See Anti-Stalinist Action Berlin Normannenstrasse Aufarbeitung (working through the past): everyday life and, 6, 47; performative inheritance and, 128; private museums as part of, 79, 83 Aufhebung (speculative synthesis), 129 Aura: of art, 114, 160; of artifacts, 31; of authenticity, 87; of countermonumental sites of memory, 150; of familiarity, 67; of museums, 62, 84; of Palace of the Republic, 93, 98; as Prussian, 114–16; of stability, 103 Authenticity, 22–24, 48, 75–77, 149, 193–94, 217n20; aura of, 87; Berlin City Castle simulacrum and, 113–14; in Berlin identity, 113–14; at Checkpoint Charlie, 155; connection to commodity fetishism, 22–23; encounter and, 154; experience enhanced by, 77; of goods, 24; intimacy and, 71–74; irony and, 25; labor theory of, 154; memory value and, 66–71; of museums, 67; narratives developing from, 70; objects, everyday life and, 67–68; professional production of, 154; quantity important for, 68; question forms of, 171; question of, 22; as trust, 67, 149; unmemorable represented through, 67, 73–74; value of, 84, 164 Autonomy, 46

Barris, Roann, 150 Bataille, Georges, 172, 220n2 Baudrillard, Jean, 51, 197n4 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 74, 113–14, 169, 186n10 Berdahl, Daphne, 20, 189n14 Berlin: architecture in reunified, 92; authentic identity of, 114; cultural rebuilding of, 115; as defined by absence, 91; inheritance of, 135; phantom skyscraper in, 97; political contentiousness in, 91; redesign of, 108, 110; reputation of, 119; signifier for, 135; as site of spatial controversies, 92; as symbolic center of nation, 111 Berlin City Castle: as absent presence, 106, 108; desire offered by, 111; as expressing Prussian aura, 114–16; official rebuilding of, 118; promise had by, 112; razing of, 91, 97; reconstructing of, 116–17; simulation of, 111–13, 112 Berlin DDR Museum, 61; interrogation room at, 78; multisensory experience at, 74; representation of the state, 86; Sabrow critique of, 62; videos shown at, 75 Berlin Wall, 4, 159; authenticity of, 149, 154–55; Bernauer Strasse memorial versions of, 150; as border, 10; cobblestone commemorative path of, 146; commemorative sites of, 138, 167; early postunification appropriation of, 141; fall of, 43, 126, 169, 174; history trail map of, 147; land under, 140; postunification trajectory of, 137; remnants of, 157; as retemporalized, 11, 168; role of, 140; spirit of, 160; traces of, 6; vanishing of, 137

Index Z 247 Berlin Wall National Monument, 153 Bernauer Strasse memorial, 11; authenticity production at, 154; Berlin wall versions presented by, 150; Checkpoint Charlie relation to, 159; as commemorative site, 137; control of, 148; physical description of, 151–52; as sacred, 149; steel rods at, 152; temporality of trauma and, 148–53 Black economy, 192n16 Black market, 22–23 Black plan, 110 Borders: Berlin Wall as, 10; movement across, 7; vanishing of, 137, 139, 141 Borneman, John, 23 Brandenburg Gate, 147 Brands: of cigarettes, 26; cult status of, 21; design of, 21; East products, 196n53; emphasis of, 41; most important, 196n53; owners of, 25. See also East products Brandt, Willy, 95 Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 19 Brown, Bill, 186n10 Burj Khalifa skyscraper, 130, 131 Butzmann, Manfred, 160 Capitalism, 23; fear of, 180; mysticism of, 45 Capitalist modernity: context of, 46; greed and, 164 Caruth, Cathy, 150 CDU. See Christian Democratic Union de Certeau, Michel, 17, 46, 123 Chapel of Reconciliation, 152, 153 Checkpoint Charlie, 11, 142; authenticity at, 155; Berlin Wall advertisement at,

159; Bernauer Strasse memorial relation to, 159; black crosses at, 143; as commemorative site, 139; consumerism at, 169; context of, 147; experience of, 154–59; fake soldiers at, 156; irony at, 155; market culture of, 158–59; migrant narratives at, 158; multimedia at, 157; temporality organization of, 154 Childhood, 61, 65. See also Nostalgia China, 5, 121, 130, 187n12 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 34, 124, 175 Christian Democrats: monuments embraced by, 142; protests by, 144 Church of Reconciliation, 148 Cigarettes, 26, 29, 193n25 Circulation, 3, 6, 9, 38, 187n11; humor as mechanism for, 41; items entering, 42–43; of redemptive practices, 168; of remains, 190n19 Cold war: Berlin Wall as symbol of, 137; castle as remedy for, 119; Checkpoint Charlie as symbol of, 154–59; generational debates from, 123; memory of, 149; planned museum of, 156 Collecting: of communism, 45; habits of, 56; as impulse, 50–51; material culture and mass, 69; as surviving, 51 Collective memory: physical places of, 92; as postnational, 185n8; production of, 139; symbolic content of, 44 Collectors: of everyday life, 85; evolution of, 9, 48; Hartwig as, 50; of kitsch, 15; Max as, 50; paraphernalia looked for by, 49; Winkler as, 53 Colonialism, 45, 119, 132

248 Y Index Coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), 184n6; everyday life and, 67; identity and, 24; second chance and, 34. See also Working through the past (Aufarbeitung) Commemorative sites. See Memory sites Commodification, 9–11, 51, 172; appropriation through, 10; of artifacts, 41; of Berlin Wall, 160; in market economy, 8; as memory obstacle, 190n23; nostalgia as effect of, 18, 31, 42–43; as nostalgia of style, 31; vanishing of forms of, 31 Commodity fetishism, 19, 22, 46 Communism: collecting of, 45; failure of, 105; GDR, Nazism and, 184n7; nostalgia for, 8; Palace of the Republic cleansed of, 121. See also Socialism Complicity: everyday life and, 45, 47; generational differences of, 171; material culture tied to, 5; proximity to power as, 103–4; reflective engagement with, 123–24. See also Double inheritance Comprehensive Concept for the Commemoration of the Berlin Wall (Gesamtkonzept zur Erinnerung an die Berliner Mauer), 147–48, 167 Consumption: cultural fluency in, 24; as intoxication, 23; modern rituals of, 38; process of, 9, 46; seductive power of, 169; as symbolic, 17; temporality of, 168 Copy, 14; of Berlin City Castle, 113, 117, 155; of the West, 100. See also Simulacrum Countermonuments, 149–50, 168 Crane, Susan, 63 Creative economy, 3; commodification and, 190n23; generational shift and, 172;

memory economy and, 168; temporary use of urban space and, 214n105 Critical reconstruction, 110, 140, 217n8 Cultural fluency, 24, 51–52 Cultural intimacy, 140 Cultural memory, 185n9; creation of, 9; of GDR, 80; landscape of, 17 Cultural obsolescence, 4; appropriation and, 172; as collectors object, 75; precipitous collapse of the state and, 26, 49 Defacement, 162 Democracy: danger of ostalgia for, 2, 62; modernism and moral claim to, 109; museums as important for, 63; revolution and, 174, 182; social democratic tradition of Volkshaus, 96 Derrida, Jacques, 128 Design, 87–88, 154, 194n29, 199n30, 204n86; attention to, 27; of brands, 21; of GDR era, 17, 29; of Humboldt Forum, 117; landscape of palace site, 132, 134, 135; of Palace of the Republic, 98; as pop culture, 37 Detemporalization, 140–41 Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). See German Democratic Republic DHM. See German Historical Museum Dictatorship: comparison of Nazi and GDR eras, 2, 9, 35, 47, 184n7; connection to everyday, 64; fear of trivialization of, 63, 86 Disarticulation, 37 Disconnection (Abgrenzung), 1, 95–96 Documentation Center for GDR Everyday Culture, 54, 56

Index Z 249 Domesticity, 73 Double bind, 173, 221n6 Double inheritance, 2, 178–80 DuBois, W. E. B., 45 East German Communist Party. See Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) East Germany. See German Democratic Republic East packets (Ostpakete), 32, 33; typical contents of, 194–95n35 East products (Ostprodukte): humor in, 33; inversion of value of, 15, 20; main brands of, 196n53; as nostalgia opposite, 33; as secondary production, 17; shift from nostalgia to regional products, 41–43; trade fairs of, 39, 40; trickster quality of, 37; uncertainty of authenticity, 26–27; Western ownership of, 25–26; work of, 20 East Side Gallery, 11; appropriation of, 168; as commemorative site, 139; defacement used by, 162; historical distinction lacking at, 160; luxury apartment building at, 165; murals at, 161; politics of occupation at, 159–67; professionalization at, 164; protests at, 166; recreational use of, 163–64; squatters at, 162–63 Echt (the real), 22–23 Economy: of appearances, 24–27; GDR failure of, 14, 194n29; of memory, 168. See also Black market; Creative economy; Market economy Eigensinn (willfulness, stubbornness), 80 Eisenhüttenstadt, 54, 198n8, 199n26, 199n30, 200n37

Ekici, Didem, 113–14 Elegiac inheritance: distinguishing characteristics of, 105; experience of, 173; melancholia, appropriation and, 93; Palace of the Republic rejecting, 128; struggle of, 120 Encounter, 5–7, 186n10; with archival past, 174–75; authenticity and, 154; Bernauer Strasse memorial as landscape of, 154; as bittersweet, 21; with complicity, 80–81, 82; East-West, 51–52, 70–71, 178–79; with Eigensinn, 80; ethnography of, 6; with everyday life, 5, 79; as modern, 137; with museum objects, 71; from past, 7, 89; spaces for personal, 83, 149; stages of, 74; third space as productive of, 159–60 Enlightened absolutism, 119 Ersatz (the substitute), 22 Everyday life, 2–6, 43, 45–48, 53, 62–64; aesthetics of, 59; apolitical assumptions about, 47, 65, 68, 73; Berlin Wall representation of, 185; collectors of, 85; as difficult, 45; emotions triggered by, 63; encounter with, 5; under fascism, 190n16; in GDR, 188n14; inversion of, 8; making of, 48; material culture of, 6, 79; materiality intersection with, 189n15; memory created from, 4; modalities of, 5; monetary value of items of, 51–52; object impact on, 46, 89; objects, authenticity and, 67–68; in postsocialism generally, 187n12, 189n15; private museums of, 6, 9, 53, 54, 56–61; products of, 20; question forms of, 171; regard for, 2; secondary production of, 123; under socialism, 46–47, 188n14; Stasi as part of, 64, 77; state-supported

250 Y Index Everyday life (cont.) museums changing relation to, 85–89; view of, 3; Volkshaus grounding in, 98. See also Wende Excess: extraction of, through appropriation, 172; of invisibility and visibility, 162; perception of, 98; producing status of original, 69; as unwanted, 48 Exit Ghost, 11; actor experience in, 177–78; language conveyed in, 179; memory and, 178; revolution ideas in, 176–77 Eyal, Gil, 44 Faier, Lieba, 6 Failed modernism, 109 Fake: Cold war souvenirs as, 155, 156; perception of Western goods as, 24; as threat to credibility, 149; visa as entry ticket, 59. See also Authenticity; Copy Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). See United Germany; West Germany Feff, Catherine, 112 Fest, Joachim, 105–6 Fischer, Martin, 149 Flierl, Bruno, 129 Flierl, Thomas, 144, 145, 214n109 Fontane, Theodore, 41 Forgetting, 66–67 Freedom Monument (Freiheitsmahnmal), 143; at Checkpoint Charlie, 142; negative optics of, 145 Friends of the Palace of the Republic (Freundeskreis Palast der Republik), 104, 132 Garbage: phase of, 88; production of, 49–50 Gauck, Joachim (President), 1 GDR. See German Democratic Republic

Gender, 49, 71, 72, 73, 202n55 Generational transmission, 8, 18, 123–24, 172–75, 181, 186n10. See also Inheritance; Third generation east Gentrification, 164, 172; opposition to, 166–67, 169; symbol of, 165 German Democratic Republic (GDR): anticolonialist rhetoric of, 45; communism, Nazism and, 184n7; cultural memory of, 80; demise of, 185n9; design of, 17, 29; economy failure of, 14, 194n29; international recognition for, 95; kitsch of, 31; lack of existence of, 134, 135; lived experience of, 43; market rejected by, 79; memory of, 39; museum experience of, 74; postunification of, 173; as present absence, 1, 185n9; products of, 28; as successful, 182; symbols of, 34; as technology leader, 19; transition of, 5; as vanished, 30; women in, 202n55 German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum, DHM), 85, 203n79 German Imperial Railway (Deutsche Reichsbahn), 13 Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany; German Democratic Republic; United Germany; West Germany Gesamtkonzept zur Erinnerung an die Berliner Mauer (Comprehensive Concept for the Commemoration of the Berlin Wall), 147–48, 167 Globalization, 168, 172, 180, 194n34 Golden future, 19, 23 Good-bye Lenin, 15, 35 Graffunder, Heinz, 98 Grocery store. See HO; Konsum

Index Z 251 Groschopp, Horst, 26, 27 Grüters, Monika, 154 Habermas, Jürgen, 115 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 11 Hamlet Machine (Müller, H.), 11, 180–81; conversations drawn from, 176; as mourning symbol, 173; reception of, 177; as unification cause, 174 Harootunian, Harry, 89 Hartwig, Jürgen, 50, 53, 54 Haunting, 175, 179 Heimat museum (heritage museum), 84; GDR private museums and, 199n26; historical growth of, 203n74 Heritage: authenticity linked to, 149; East Side Gallery status of, 160, 161; museums of, 84; national architecture of, 98; Volkshaus as, 96. See also Heimat museum Herzfeld, Michael, 20 Highmore, Ben, 48 Hildebrandt, Alexandra, 142–44, 166, 217n18 Hildebrandt, Rainer, 142, 155 Hinkel, Maik Uwe, 166–67 Historians’ debate (Historikerstreit), 109, 115, 184n7, 210n57. See also Architects’ debate History Mile (Berlin), 145 HO (grocery store), 88. See also Konsum Höhne, Günther, 194n29, 199n30 Holocaust Memorial. See Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Honecker, Erich, 15, 195n36, 207n22; architecture of, 98; portrait of, 77; socialism pursued by, 97 House of History (Bonn), 86, 203n17 House of History (Wittenberg), 86, 148

House of History Foundation (Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, HdG), 85–87, 88, 148–49. See also House of History (Bonn); Leipzig Forum for Contemporary History; Museum in the Cultural Brewery Prenzlauer Berg; Palace of Tears Humboldt Forum: building of, 130; critique of, 119, 132; as cultural institution, 132; inauguration of, 135; key formula of, 117; logic of, 132; offerings of, 119 Humor, 33, 41, 195n38; trickster spirit and, 36–37. See also Irony; Stiob Huyssen, Andreas, 92, 149, 186n10 Hyde, Lewis, 37 Identity: as authentic, 114; cityscape as defining, 111; construction by appropriation, 7; East German, 20, 38, 52, 61; German, 6, 44, 115; loss of, 26, 31, 93; memory politics of, 35; objects relation to, 52; socialist, 96; taste and construction of, 25 IM. See Informelle Mitarbeiter Industrial Design Collection (Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung), 87, 199n30 Informelle Mitarbeiter (IM), 27. See also Ministry for State Security Inheritance: as ambiguous, 115, 179; disputes over, 171–72; handling of, 10; as hidden, 175; memory and, 92; modes of, 92–93; of postwar modernity, 70; recognition of, 178. See also Double inheritance; Elegiac inheritance; Mythic inheritance; Performative inheritance Intershop 2000, 9, 14, 15, 171, 191n2

252 Y Index Intimacy: authenticity and, 71–74; of laundry, 72; in museum exhibitions, 77; through objects, 71. See also Cultural intimacy Irony: anger elicited by, 34; of appropriation, 15, 37; authenticity and, 25; at Checkpoint Charlie, 155; in ostalgia, 44; as self-distancing, 36 Ivy, Marilyn, 17, 31, 44 James, Beverly, 78 James, William, 7 Jameson, Frederic, 191n5 Jewish Museum (Berlin), 92, 150 Jones, Sara, 77 Jurgens, Jeffrey, 158 Kaden, Conny, 56 Kampehl Museum, 58 Kitsch: analysis of, 36; collectors of, 15; of GDR, 31; miniaturized forms of, 35; objects as, 63; in Palace of the Republic, 100 Klausmeier, Axel, 149 Kleihues, Paul, 110 Kneisler, Bruno, 101 Koga, Yukiko, 92, 178, 190n19, 220n1 Kohl, Helmut, 85, 175, 180, 203n79 Konsum (grocery store), 61, 88; and authenticity of its reproduction, 59, 87 Korff, Gottfried, 62–63, 84 Krier, Leon, 109 LaCapra, Dominick, 115, 128 Lampugnani, Vittorio, 113 Lay, Conrad, 25 Lefebvre, Henri, 123

Leipzig Forum for Contemporary History (Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig), 64, 86. See also House of History Foundation Lewandowsky, Via, 135 Libeskind, Daniel, 150 Liessmann, Konrad, 36 Lieu de mémoire, 92, 103, 185n9 Loeb, Carolyn, 140 Longing: modernist nostalgia as, 18; for modernity, 18–25; object separated from, 31; for Palace of the Republic, 104 Lüdtke, Alf, 47 Ludwig, Andreas, 54; Documentation Center for GDR Everyday Culture created by, 56; material culture and shifting practices under socialism per, 79 Market economy: commodification in, 8; GDR rejecting, 79; sweep of, 4–5; as unified, 25 Material culture, 3–6; complicity tied to, 5; of everyday life, 6, 79; as fetishism, 19; mass collecting and, 69; memory relationship with, 186n10; past represented by, 66; role in representing the socialist everyday, 48; unification of, 6; vantage point of, 3 Materiality, 4, 49; empirical questions about, 137; everyday life intersection with, 189n15; nostalgia relationship with, 18 Max, Wolfgang, 50 McLuhan, Marshall, 74 Melancholia: appropriation, elegiac inheritance and, 93; mourning, absent presence and, 205n8; as unsuccessful, 111

Index Z 253 Mementos, 52 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 141, 143, 183n1 Memory, 2–3, 172, 182; antipolitics of, 62–66; through appropriation, 7; commodification as obstacle for, 190n23; economy of, 168; empirical questions about, 137; everyday life creating, 4; foreclosure of, 139; forgetting struggle with, 66–67; of GDR, 39; history as accomplice to, 92; inheritance and, 92; keeper of national, 139; keeping space available to, 139–40; landscape of, 17, 85, 89, 140, 148; museums representing, 56, 63, 89; as objective, 65; of Palace of the Republic, 103; politics of, 35, 43, 62–66, 173; trauma and repression of, 67; unmemorable, value and, 67; vanishing of, 105; worth and, 81. See also Collective memory; Cultural memory; Forgetting; Multidirectional memory; Selective memory; Unmemorable Memory sites: Bernauer Strasse memorial as, 137; Checkpoint Charlie as, 139; concept of, 144–48; as countermonuments, 150; East Side Gallery as, 139; presence and absence in, 140; temporality deployed by, 139 Memory value: authenticity and, 66–71; creating of, 74; distinction of, 66 Migration, 158 Ministry for State Security (Mf S), 27; filmed surveillance by, 75; place in Berlin Wall commemoration, 148; preservation of, 64; question of individual complicity with, 81; relation to everyday life, 64, 77

Misuse value, 186n10 Mittag, Günther, 46 Modernism, 108–9. See also Failed modernism; Postmodernism Modernist nostalgia: as longing, 18; role of, 17 Modernity: of architecture, 99; longing for, 18–25; as postwar, 70; role of, 10. See also Capitalist modernity; Socialist modernity Monuments: Christian Democrats embracing, 142; after unification, 141. See also Berlin Wall National Monument; Countermonuments; Freedom Monument (Freiheitsmahnmal) Mourning: Hamlet Machine as symbol of, 173; melancholia, absent presence and, 205n8 Müller, Heiner, Hamlet Machine by, 11, 173–74, 176–77, 180–81 Müller, Jan Werner, 66, 184n6 Multidirectionality, 169 Multidirectional memory, 91, 168 Museum for German History (Museum für Deutsche Geschichte, MDG), 203n79 Museum in the Cultural Brewery Prenzlauer Berg (Kulturbrauerei), 86–88. See also House of History Foundation Museums, 38; as amateur, 9, 56, 66, 83; as antipolitics form, 48, 65; appropriation in, 48, 89; aura of, 62; authenticity of, 67; displays in, 59, 60, 81; distinguishing between, 64; domesticity in, 73; empathetic experience at, 83–84; as entertainment, 62; of everyday life, 6,

254 Y Index Museums (cont.) 54, 199n26; GDR experience in, 74; interactive experience in, 72, 77; intimacy in, 77; items found in, 59; lifestyle shift presented in, 89; memory represented in, 56, 63, 89; as object, 7; private compared to federally funded, 84–88; prominent examples of, 85; resistance in, 80; after reunification, 79; review of, 70–71; songs played in, 76; sprouting of, 53; statements from, 65; state-supported, 85–89; as successful, 60–61; tactility invoked in, 71–73; unmemorable represented in, 78. See also Apolda Museum; Berlin DDR Museum; Documentation Center for GDR Everyday Culture; Heimat museum; House of History; Kampehl Museum; Museum in the Cultural Brewery Prenzlauer Berg; Perleberg Museum; Pirna Museum; Tutow Museum; Zeitreise Museum Museumsbaracke Olle DDR. See Apolda Museum Mythic inheritance: aestheticization and, 120; Palace of the Republic rejecting, 128; timelessness of, 93 Nadkarni, Maya, 42, 65 Nation: in 1974 GDR constitution, 206n16; Berlin City Castle as expression of, 119; memory and national identity, 2, 44; symbolic terrain of, 92 Nazism, 184n7; castle under, 210n58; compared to socialism, 9, 35; modernism continuity with, 109; Volkshaus fate under, 96. See also Architects’ debate; Historians’ debate

Neoconservatism, 113 Neoliberalism, 172; as omnipresent, 180; as predatory, 164 Niemeyer, Oscar, 99–100 Nostalgia: appropriation of memory through, 44; of childhood, 64–65; commodification and, 9, 43, 172; for communism, 8; as dangerous, 1–2; East products as opposite of, 33; elegiac mourning and, 103; losing the scent of, 37; for loss of longing, 19; materiality relationship with, 18; pathology of, 206n13; as phenomenon, 17–18; as popular-culture form, 42; question forms of, 171; transformation of trash into, 50. See also Modernist nostalgia; Ostalgia Nostalgia of style, 17, 27–31, 187n12 Objects: as antipolitical, 68; of consumer, 6; as culturally obsolete, 53; displays of, 69; everyday life, authenticity and, 67–68; everyday life impact of, 46, 89; garbage phase, relation to, 49; intimacy through, 71; as kitsch, 63; longing separated from, 31; monetary value of, 51; as museum, 7; of ostalgia, 30, 34, 42; sensory experience of, 74–75; subject role with, 76; as trash, 7; treatment of, 62; trust gained by, 67–68; as unsettled, 173–74; value of, 8, 50–52; worth of, 66 Open Depot, 54. See also Documentation Center for GDR Everyday Culture Ostalgia (Ostalgie), 2, 191n3; accusations towards, 35; avoidance of, 64; through commodification, 43; contradictory forms of, 31; criticism for, 45; force for,

Index Z 255 35; institutionalization of, 17; as ironic, 44; negative connotations of, 44; objects of, 30, 34, 42; relation of materiality and nostalgia to, 18; resistance to, 38; as selling point for regional products, 41; as social fact, 43; spectrum of, 17; spirit of, 36; as trickster, 38; t-shirt representing, 16; as vector for collective identity, 31; wave of, 15. See also East products; Nostalgia Ostpakete. See East packets Ostprodukte. See East products Oswalt, Phillip, 123 Oushakine, Serguei, 37 Palace of Tears (Tränenpalast), 145, 147–48. See also House of History Foundation Palace of the Republic, 1, 8, 99; absent presence and, 106; aerial view of, 107; appropriation for, 122–23, 172; architecture of, 97–100; art installations in, 125; asbestos contamination in, 101, 103, 104–5, 209n36; aura of, 93, 98; closing of, 93; Communism removed from, 121; cultural program of, 100, 124; demolition of, 129, 131, 215n118; desecration of, 104; elegiac and mythic inheritance rejected by, 128; emotions evoked by, 94; extermination of, 104, 120; Glass Flower of, 100, 101; grafitto on, 134, 135; interior of, 122; memory of, 103; Milk Bar at, 94; performative inheritance transforming, 128; postunification state of, 95; public space debate around, 121; replacing of, 106; as ruins, 172; social dancing in, 102; as success, 95; Supernova in, 126–27; as symbol, 124; symbolic farewell to, 128;

temporary site use of, 133; unbuilding of, 91; worth of, 104. See also Volkspalast Parkin, David, 52, 53 Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), 142–43 Past, the: aestheticization of, 93; antipolitics of, 83; appropriation of, 3, 7, 171; commodification of, 8, 51–52; debates about, 109, 115–16; double bind of identifying with and disavowing, 173; dreams of, 123; haunting by, 175; kept on verge of vanishing, 44; longing for, 18; temporal multidirectionality of, 169; value (worth) of, 67; visible keeping, 139. See also Coming to terms with the past; Working through the past people’s house (Volkshaus), 96, 98, 124 Performative inheritance: appropriation of, 93; double inheritance and, 178; in Exit Ghost, 176–78; Palace of the Republic transformed through, 128. See also Volkspalast Perleberg Museum: displays in, 56, 60, 61, 72; mirror exhibit in, 82; political content at, 81 Peschken, Goerd, 106 Pettman, Dominic, 182 Pfaus, Marion, 132 Pirna Museum, 56 Postmodernism, 31, 113 Postsocialism, 5, 42, 74, 187n11, 192n16 Postunification: Berlin land use plan, 140; denial of alternatives, 175; generations of, 18; IM as dominant figure in, 27; market society, 89; narrative of GDR, 173

256 Y Index Postwar: figure of Hamlet in, 173; modern design in, 200n30; modernity and, 70; narrative of German history, 85; sacrifice for socialism in, 79, 89; target of conservative city planning critique, 108–10 Potsdamer Platz, 163 Present absence, 1, 110–14, 185n9 Price, Cedric, 124 Prussia, 211n79; aura related to, 114–16; enlightened absolutism of, 119; as lighthearted, 116; post reunification, 116; symbolization of, 115 Prussian Cultural Foundation, 116 Real, the (Echt), 22–23 Rearticulation, 37 Relais Landscape Architects, 133, 135 Resistance, 8; everyday life as form of, 46–47; in museums, 64–65, 80, 84 Retemporalization: of Berlin Wall, 11, 168; types of, 148 Reunification, 34; Berlin architecture after, 92; museums after, 79; Prussia post, 116; unification compared to, 183n2. See also Unification Reverse building (Rückbau), 129 Rofel, Lisa, 6 Rosenfeld, Gavriel, 109, 116 Rossi, Aldo, 110–11 Rothberg, Michael, 91 Rückbau (reverse building), 129 Ruins: appropriation of, 120–23; in colonial modernity, 190n19; conservation of, 139; Palace of the Republic as, 172; visibility of, 105

Sabrow, Martin, 47, 62, 63, 68 Sabrow commission, 47, 62 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, 29–31 Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung (Industrial Design Collection), 87, 199n30 Santner, Eric, 173, 175, 205n8 Schmundt, Hilmar, 29 Schröder, Gerhard, 95 Schüffner, Marc, 108 Secondary production, 46, 123 SED. See Socialist Unity Party of Germany SED: Stunning Eastern Design, 28 Selective memory, 2 Self: as fully developed, 19; reconstruction of, 52; worth of, 51–52 Self-curation, 70, 83 Shakespeare, William, 11 Shevchenko, Olga, 42, 65 Schubert, Thomas, 181 Siedler, Wolf Jobst, 106, 110, 111, 119 Simulacrum, 113–14 Slogans, 21–22, 25–26, 33–34, 42, 192n13, 193n25 Socialism: national content and, 42; era of, 2; everyday life under, 46–47, 188n14; humor as component in, 195n38; ideology of, 45–46; Ludwig on material culture and, 79; of state, 46. See also Postsocialism Socialist modernity, 1, 25, 46, 79–80, 97–101 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED): mocking of, 28; victims of, 34–35 Society for the Documentation of GDR Everyday Culture, 54, 55 Sound: in everyday museum exhibits, 76–78; “sound traces” art project, 135

Index Z 257 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. See Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Space: absence and, 110, 150; as apolitical, 68; built space as empty signifier, 120; consumption as producing, 158; of everyday, 3, 47, 80, 89; horror vacui, 122; public space, 91; of resistance, 46, 123, 163; as therapeutic, 83; time and space, 137, 139. See also Third space; Time frame Space expansion halls, 13 Spatiality. See Space Spectrality: of Berlin City Castle, 106; of everyday life, 77, 89 Speechless brand cigars, 28–29 Speechlessness (Sprachlosigkeit), 179 Speculative synthesis (Aufhebung), 129 Stasi. See Ministry for State Security State repression, symbols of, 10 Stereotypes, persistence of, 7 Stimmann, Hans, 109–10, 123 Stiob, 36, 47 Stodolsky, Ivor, 36 Stubbornness (Eigensinn), 80 Substitute, the (Ersatz), 22 Supernova, in Palace of the Republic, 126–27 Synesthesia, 74–79; employment of, 74; purpose of, 76 Tactility: museums invoking, 71–73; as negative, 74 Taste: change in, 24; definition of, 25; uniformity of, 21–22 Temporality: of Berlin Wall sites, 168; changes in value due to, 8; Checkpoint Charlie organization of, 154; as echoes

of historical gaps, 132; generational transmission and, 186n10; making memory visible through, 137; memory sites deploying, 139; nostalgia and, 191n8; now time, 169–71; of socialist desire, 18; of trauma and Bernauer Strasse memorial, 148–53; visibility aligned with, 148. See also Detemporalization; Retemporalization; Time Temporary use (Zwischennutzung), 121, 123, 125, 133, 213n96, 213nn104–5 Theatrale subversion, 176 Thiel, Frank, 156 Third generation east (Dritte Generation Ost), 173–74, 177–78, 181, 221n16 Third space, 159–60, 162 Till, Karen, 110 Time, 137; acceleration of, 155, 158; mythic inheritance and, 120; places and things out of, 1, 171; slowing down of, 151, 154, 158. See also Detemporalization; Retemporalization; Temporality Time frame (Zeitraum), 139–40 Topography of Terror, 145, 147 Touch: feel of East products and, 28; “history to touch” motto, 60, 73; intimacy and, 71. See also Synesthesia Trade fairs, 39, 40 Transition, 5, 7, 43 Trash: to artifact, 53; as object, 7; transformation of, 50. See also Garbage Trauma: Bernauer Strasse and the temporality of, 148–53; experience of, 150–51; history as, 74, 81; memory repression and, 67; narrative of, 150 Trickster: functions of, 37; mythical spirit of, 36; ostalgia as, 38; role of, 9

258 Y Index Trivialization (Verharmlosung), 2; meaning of, 5; as reckless, 79; risk for, 62, 66 Tutow Museum, 44, 60, 64 Ulbricht, Walter, 15, 96–98 Unbuilt, 8, 91. See also Rückbau Unification: as abrupt, 5; as consumer desire, 23; Deutsches Theater reaction to, 175, 179; Hamlet Machine performance and, 174; identity change from, 27; inability of, 19–20; influence of, 184n5; of market economy, 25; of material culture, 6; monuments after, 141; opportunities from, 110; Palace of the Republic state after, 95; purging after, 48–49; reunification compared to, 183n2; as second chance, 12. See also Reunification United Germany: absorption of East Germany into, 4, 52; democratic legitimacy, 62; Prussian inheritance in, 115; socialist everyday legacy in, 188n14. See also German Democratic Republic; West Germany Unmemorable: memory, value and, 67; museums representing, 78; as worth category, 67 Unsettle, 3, 4, 6, 10, 173, 177, 187n11 Urban Catalyst, 123, 213n96 Urban space, 92, 108–10, 145, 187n11 Utopia, 180–82 Value, 3–4; appropriation creating, 172; as authentic, 84, 164; inversion of, 20; multisensory experience creating, 74; of object transformation, 8, 43, 50–52; poles of, 3; unmemorable, memory and, 7–8, 66–67. See also Misuse value; Worth

Vanishing: of Berlin Wall, 137, 169; of borders, 137, 139, 141; of commodification forms, 31; of era, 15; of GDR, 30; of memory, 105; past on verge of, 44; of state, 1, 93 Veenis, Milena, 18 Vergangenheitsbewältigung. See Coming to terms with the past Verharmlosung. See Trivialization Visuality: as dissonance, 81; relation to tactility, 74, 78; visualization of the castle, 112 Void: Berlin acquiring, 91; historical circumstance creating, 149; after palace demolition, 132, 135; relation to memory, 139 Volkshaus (people’s house), 96, 98, 124 Volkspalast (people’s palace), 124–28. See also Palace of the Republic von Boddien, Wilhelm, 106, 110, 112; castle campaign of, 113, 123; justifications of, 114; as vindicated, 117 von Humboldt, Alexander, 117 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 117 Vukov, Nikolai, 66 Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, 7 Waldvogel, Florian, 122 Wende, 53, 174–75, 177. See also Reunification; Unification Weskott, Martin, 50 Western products, as privileged, 22, 31, 49 West Germany, 1; debates about the imperial and Nazi pasts in, 109, 115; postwar design and, 200n30; relations with East Germany, 95, 206n15. See also United Germany Weyrauch, Romy, 174–77

Index Z 259 What Remains (Wolf ), 22 Willfullness (Eigensinn), 80 Wolf, Christa, 22, 179 Working through the past (Aufarbeitung): everyday life and, 6, 47; performative inheritance and, 128; private museums as part of, 79. See also Coming to terms with the past Worth: as intersubjective, 51; of items, 20, 49; memory and, 81; of objects, 66; of

Palace of the Republic, 104; of self, 51–52; as unmemorable category, 67. See also Value Yurchak, Alexei, 52 Zeitraum (time frame), 139–40 Zeitreise Museum, 57, 61, 63, 69 Zepter, Martin, 175–77, 180 Zwischennutzung. See Temporary use